Tema MilsteinUNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Humanities and Languages
Tema Milstein
Professor
About
54
Publications
11,015
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852
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Tema Milstein's work tends to ways cultural meaning systems shape ecological understandings, identities, and actions. In addition to articles below, see Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840) and
Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (Routledge, 2017) (https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315562148)
Publications
Publications (54)
In this advanced review, we reflect on our own teaching and synthesise recent scholarship on higher education practices in order to examine the place of the teacher in environmental communication pedagogy. Most prior studies of environmental communication pedagogy have addressed on-campus or in-the-field teaching, with little attention paid to the...
This article considers higher education's role in climate crisis, reflecting on the potential of action-oriented pedagogy. As a reflection on practice, the authors consider a new postgraduate course, Climate Crisis and Action (CCA), launched in 2022 as one of a suite of new courses using inside-out pedagogy in one of the oldest (and most recently h...
Environmental communication as a field of research as well as field of practice exists in a time of accelerating urgency. Anthropogenic environmental crisis is now the daily content and context of communication, making the field’s early self-definition as a “crisis discipline” (Cox, 2007) ever more apt. The ways we understand and practice communica...
As a relatively new field of learning, the pedagogy of environmental communication is quickly evolving. Untethered to a single academic tradition of research or teaching, the field can dynamically respond to current tumultuous local and global environmental, social, and political conditions. The sociocultural and ecological focus of the field and i...
In this chapter, our aim is to highlight opportunities for environmental communication scholars to be revolutionary in order to deconstruct common sense, facilitate environmental democracy, and envision and manifest exciting, innovative, and transformative pedagogy and practice. As one tactic toward this aim, we introduce ecoculture jams as higher...
The Florida Tampa Electric Company’s Manatee Viewing Center (MVC) and its fossil-fuelled Big Bend power plant are separated by a narrow ship channel that serves as state and federal sanctuary for threatened Florida Manatees. As humans have destroyed much of their warm spring habitat, many manatees are forced to rely on power plant hot water effluen...
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) is a timely book, as across the globe more and more of us awake to our always interconnected selves. The Handbook brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self and group identities, introducing an interdisciplinary, insightful assembly of original theory and research on plan...
http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/blooming-in-the-doom-and-gloom-bringing-regenerative-pedagogy-to-the-rebellion_2020_04/
Journal of Media Literacy & Journal of Sustainability Education
ABSTRACT: Transformative sustainable pedagogy and public intellectual work share the same aims and guideposts, including upholding higher education’s foundat...
New radical environmental action movements are attracting large numbers of diverse actors who inevitably will take inspiration and learn from mistakes of those radical environmental organizations that precede them and continue today into middle age. The representational strategies of these established organizations are of specific interest as they...
This study explores ecocultural meaning systems and practices among villagers in Oman within the context of globalising neoliberal material-symbolic discourses. Our analysis illustrates ways in which villager understandings of ecological relations are rooted in traditional agricultural practices, cultural values, and spirituality. We identify theme...
Article URL: http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/embodying-education-performing-environmental-meanings-knowledges-and-transformations_2018_02/
Journal of Sustainability Education
Introduction: “When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” is the seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical free write exercise developed by Tema Milstein (Milstein, Alhinai, Castr...
Storied Seas Journal: https://storiedseas.org/storied-seas-journal/
In this unprecedented era of anthropogenic ecological destruction, this study illustrates inadequacies in conceptual language available in Western settings to think deeply and holistically about “nature.” At the same time, the study illustrates transformative potential of moments of ecocultural reflexivity. Using free write methodology, we examine...
As ever expanding accretions of human industrial and residential development pave over endangered Florida manatees’ warm water springs winter habitat, more than half of the manatees have come to depend upon fossil fuel-burning power plant hot water effluent channels for survival. In an effort to save these manatees, environmental activists have lev...
This study investigates ecocultural discourses and practices among the Gedeo in southern Ethiopia within the contexts of globalizing commodification of nature, successive governmental extractivist and conservationist discourses, and increasingly influential colonial present religious systems. Our analysis illustrates ways in which indigenous Gedeo...
Given the urgency of environmental problems, how we communicate about our ecological relations is crucial. Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice is concerned with ways to help learners effectively navigate and consciously contribute to the communication shaping our environmental present and future.
The book brings together internationa...
https://storiedseas.org/storied-seas-journal/
Center for Humans & Nature article: https://www.humansandnature.org/is-nature-really-the-greatest-show-on-earth
We illustrate how culture jam practitioners and pedagogues are responding to increasing commercial incorporation by using participatory communication strategies to bring the act of jamming back into the realm of relocating culture. We analyze the past decade's evolution of one of YouTube's first viral videos, “Where the hell is Matt?,” and connect...
https://theieca.org/blogs/alison-anderson/2015/11/17/seaworld-wild-nature-performer-metaphor-holds-sway
This study ethnographically identifies and examines a common-sense performer metaphor entangled within deep-rooted Western ecocultural conceptions, in which humans are perceived as separate from and audience to a spectacular nature. I illustrate the cultural cohesiveness of the performer metaphor in a Western nature tourism setting to draw attentio...
Despite its inherent interdisciplinarity, the Communication discipline has remained an almost entirely anthropocentric enterprise. This book represents early and prominent forays into the subject of human-animal communication from a Communication Studies perspective, an effort that brings a discipline too long defined by that fallacy of division, h...
This case study of Israeli tourism discourse during a time of heightened violent conflict compares official state discourse, which situates tourism in Israel as safe and the country's status as ‘normal’, with material–symbolic interceptions of individuals and occurrences. I locate an intra/intercultural dialectic of ‘normalcy’ used to signify sever...
This study complicates the gendering of “mother nature,” pointing to an underlying everyday discursive formation of nature that is decidedly androcentric. The dialectic at play, a favorably forefronted gynocentric pole masking a dominant androcentric pole, problematizes past understandings of binaries and offers new ways to understand humanature. B...
At this time of mounting human-induced ecological crises, the ways people communicate about nature have far reaching reverberations. Communication scholars engaged with ecological issues often assert that what we say is what we see (Cantrill & Oravec, 1996, p. 1) and what we see, or perceive, shapes how we behave ecologically. Communication scholar...
This essay features critical reflections on a process of generative community-based
participatory research (CBPR) in which communication researchers collaborated with
environmental organizations, cultural advocacy groups, and community participants to
identify better ways of addressing ecocultural struggles. In response to Depoe’s call to
promote s...
Article URL: https://www.academia.edu/2527303/Survive_critique_and_create_Guiding_radical_pedagogy_and_critical_public_scholarship_with_the_discursive_guideposts_of_ecopedagogy
We focus on the expressive performative eruptions that often mark interactive and embodied humanature events, on the discourses that surround and entangle them, and on ways such extra-discursive communicative moments might point us to new understandings about the intersections of nature, culture, and the body. Using the frameworks of tourist as spe...
This study examines the contested space of environmental inequity and demonstrates how engaged intercultural communication research can be used to put forth seldom heard cultural environmental meaning systems. In an attempt to bridge ecojustice–environmentalist divides, we use Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) to understand and promote practice...
This study focuses on communication as a lens and tool for reinvigorating and empowering marginalized cultural environmental relations. We use a community-based cultural approach to identify a core Hispanic premise of a sense of relations-in-place. This premise constitutes nature as a socially integrated space that provides the grounding for human...
This study designed and validated an instrument for measuring sojourners' intercultural and everyday communication self-efficacy. Factor analysis of a Likert-type scale completed by Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme respondents (N = 213) identified a unidimensional-factor solution with 34-items loading (α=.95). It revealed negative, posit...
Technological innovations can radically alter the organization of power in politics. However, there is significant debate over whether new media technologies - such as the Internet, wireless networks, and relational databases - will have positive, negative, or any media effects at all. We argue that one of the most important implications of new med...
Pointing and naming is a basic practice of using communication to discern nature. This study illustrates connections between this symbolic action and ecocultural relations. I focus on a transnational site of wildlife tourism to explore ways nature identification has historically mediated perceptual, behavioral, and political transformations. I also...
Israeli media coverage of a well-known event, the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, provides a glimpse into the nature of competing collective identities held by Israelis. The potential for multiple interpretations (and therefore multiple perspectives) of the largely nonverbal event allows for these identities to be presented...
This study examines how certain Western institutional discourses reproduce particular human relationships with nature. The analysis focuses upon the institutional setting of the zoo, examining long-standing multi-voiced debates about zoos and exploring the contemporary zoo's conservation discourses and cultural, lexical, and spatial elements of gaz...
The case study for this ethnographic investigation is communication within the highest concentration of whale watch operations in the world, located in transnational waters of the North Pacific. The author explores this Western cultural setting in an effort to expand upon the culturally and environmentally inclusive conceptual framework of communic...
Article URL: Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture
https://www.academia.edu/2527316/The_nature_inside_our_heads_Exploring_possibilities_for_widespread_cultural_paradigm_shifts_about_nature
The nature we perceive and breathe is deeply rooted in the culture we use as our lens and filter. In order to envision and enact nondestructive relatio...
Consistent with calls by O’Sullivan (199937.
O’Sullivan , P. 1999. Bridging the mass‐interpersonal divide: Synthesis of scholarship in HCR. Human Communication Research, 25: 569–588. [CrossRef], [Web of Science ®]View all references) and Rogers (199945.
Rogers , E. M. 1999. Anatomy of the two subdisciplines of communication study. Human Communica...
This paper empirically examines communication self-efficacy as a possible profound payoff of sojourning. A review of relevant literature explores the interrelationships of communication, sojourning, and personal growth. Questionnaire data from an international sample of 212 Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET) alumni are used to test hypothe...
Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commo ns and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential role of that market in faci...
Projects
Project (1)
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Ecocultural-Identity-1st-Edition/Milstein-Castro-Sotomayor/p/book/9781138478411:
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. The editors introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux and formation in the Anthropocene – or what cultural ecologist David Abram presciently introduces in this Handbook as the Humilocene, the "epoch of humility." Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key inquiries in this burgeoning field:
Section I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding understandings of who we are and how we become as individuals, groups, and a species.
Section II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and ways difference and spaces of interaction can be powerful sources for reimagining futures.
Section III illustrates ways the media sphere (re)produces and challenges particular ecocultural identifications.
Section IV delves into politics of identities and ways ecocultural frameworks inform resolutions as complex and integral as the current planetary moment.
Section V demonstrates ways to evolve identities and, in turn, the sociocultural systems at the heart of ecocultural relations.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential interdisciplinary resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration.
