Affective Encounters with Tidal Livelihoods: Digital Field Rhetorics for Justice and Care

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we describe our engaged rhetorical fieldwork with clammers, whose daily work takes place in intertidal ecosystems. Growing out of a longer-term ethnographic project, clammers invited us to join them in the mud to learn more about their practice and livelihoods. Many clammers use techniques highly adapted to their surroundings, and likewise encouraged us to diversify our own techniques as we characterized these live rhetorics. In response, we continued showing up but with different tools than are typically used in qualitative research, in particular body-mounted cameras. These tools have shaped subsequent encounters with field sites and livelihoods and have made it possible for us to analyze clamming practices through digital videos. We describe our approach and how rhetorical field methods can advance both scholarship and praxis through digital field rhetoric. We conclude with reflections on how the affordances of digital rhetoric have come to matter for our research and for affective livelihoods like clamming given the pressures of accelerating environmental change that require engaged rhetorical fieldwork to continually craft intuitive, careful, and justice-oriented action.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital field rhetoric
• rhetorical field methods
• ecology
• affect
• care

Acknowledgements

The authors contributed to this paper in the following ways: Quiring and McGreavy co-led the research design, data collection, methodology, analysis, and writing. Quiring and Hathaway wrote the thick descriptions of viewing episodes. Quiring built the website and coordinated the article review process. McGreavy established the ethnographic research with clamming communities, built early relationships with clammers, and secured funding to support this effort. The authors would like to thank all clammers and other community members who contributed to and supported this research and the anonymous peer reviewers who provided insightful and rich suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Tyler Quiring http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9754-4079

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation [award #11A-1330691] and the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation to the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine. We also received support from the University of Maine Humanities Center.