Communication ETDs

Publication Date

Fall 12-7-2020

Abstract

The present study looks at farmers’ discourse about water and water relations. Through qualitative interviews using the method of cultural discourse analysis (CuDA), and the framework of ecocultural dialectics, the study reveals how, as farmers talk about water, they also make explicit and implicit arguments about specific cultural relations with the biosphere, as well as the role of identity, place, and power in designing and implementing agricultural solutions to ecological and social problems. I argue that the contradictions in how farmers discursively envision the problems of water pollution and scarcity, as well as solutions to those problems in their farming practices and in society at large, are embedded with two dialectics: objectification vs. relationality and idealism vs. embodiment. Moreover, these dialectics reveal another deeper pattern of, on one hand, ecocultural fragmentation in discourses of objectification and idealism, and on the other hand, ecocultural continuity in discourses of relationality and embodiment. Many farmers at the Rio Grande Community Farm (RGCF), the site of the present study, and some who previously farmed at RGCF and now work other traditional farming practices, produce discourse that depicts their work as part of a continuous, centuries-long fight to protect the multiple forms life (including humans) that compose shared waterways. Other farmers, while still working in the same contexts, reconstruct dominant discourses that depict humans as separate and superior to other forms of life, and support primarily technical solutions to relational ecological problems. While examples of discourse that represent the far ends of this continuum do exist, many farmers also produce hybrid discourse, and demonstrate a multivocality of ecocultural experience in their talk. As farmers and sustainability-oriented organizations envision and work toward a future of multispecies and mutual survival, they can benefit from understanding how multiple and potentially contradictory ecocultural discourses inform their members’ understandings of specific water issues, as well as larger existential questions of agency and survival. Grounding their missions and learning processes in place-based direct action and leadership may offer more hope for changing ecocultural relations than focusing the vast majority of their energy and resources on technical issues, especially if the contradictions in conceptualizations of problems and solutions are unclear. Moreover, the framework of dialectics I elaborate in the present study offers examples of dealing with emotions of ecocultural anxiety, guilt, and loss in ways that can both reproduce fragmentation between people and place or enable deeper continuity between human and more-than-human communities. I argue that the distinctions in fragmentation and continuity, both in individual participants’ personal discursive contradictions and across participants with different ecocultural backgrounds, are not only tied to differences in how farmers make sense of place, water, and agricultural practices, but are undergirded by farmers’ experiences and subjectivities and material and symbolic choices within a history of white colonization of Indigenous lands, ways of life, and ways of knowing and relating to water. The present study demonstrates that different cultural ways of understanding both identity-based cultural relations with water (ecocultural identities and relations) influence conceptualizations of water within the world of agriculture and can shape whole perspectives on what constitutes sustainable and just food systems, the potential for global-scale sustainable human presences in ecosystems, and just water leadership and governance.

Language

English

Keywords

Environmental Communication, Intercultural Communication, Environmental Justice, Sustainable Agriculture, Water Governance, Place-based Knowledge

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Communication

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Department of Communication and Journalism

First Committee Member (Chair)

David Weiss

Second Committee Member

Tema Milstein (Co-chair)

Third Committee Member

Marco Briziarelli

Fourth Committee Member

Kathy Isaacson

Fifth Committee Member

Chris Duvall

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