ABSTRACT
Introduction The complexity of environmental problems, with their intricate connection to the material, cultural, social, economic, political aspects of our lives, invites scholars to bring diverse conceptual, theoretical, and methodological frameworks to the task of understanding and mitigating these expansive concerns. The more perspectives, the more dynamic our understanding of these problems and the greater options available to us for dealing with the most pressing issue of our time. This chapter explores approaches for analyzing communication that have as their primary goal gaining insight into how communication constructs and influences people’s awareness, orientation to, and sensemaking of the environment. These humanist and critical approaches are less concerned with unearthing environmental “facts,” but rather focus on understanding how communication functions pragmatically and constitutively. The rigor for these approaches comes both in the close, critical engagement of texts, informed by specific conceptual and/or theoretical insights, and, at other times, in the systemic application of methodology and the use of textual evidence to support claims made by researchers. Rhetorical criticism, the first approach introduced in this chapter, is primarily used to explain how communication functions through the analysis of symbolic acts and artifacts, broadly referred to as the “texts.” A broad, multifaceted approach, rhetorical criticism encompasses both a hermeneutic orientation as well as more defined methods of critical interpretation when contemplating a text or set of discursive practices, including what have been termed Neo-Aristotelian, genre, feminist, metaphor, cluster, pentadic, narrative, and ideological (Foss, 2009). Each has its perceptual strengths and limitations, leaving it to the discretion of the critic to formulate an interpretive approach that provides the most insight into the subject being analyzed. Discourse analysis, the second approach examined in this chapter, has an even more extensive reach, spanning humanist, critical/cultural, and social scientific perspectives. Trappes-Lomax (2004) lists the various discourse analysis approaches: pragmatics (including speech act theory and politeness theory), conversation analysis, ethnography of communication, interactional sociolinguistics, systemic-function linguistics (SFL), Birmingham school discourse analysis, text-linguistics, pragmatic and social linguistic approaches to power in language, and critical discourse analysis (2004: 136). In this chapter, I focus generally on the discourse analysis approaches found in environmental communication that come from humanist or critical perspectives.
