Tema Milstein
Tema Milstein's work is in the field of environmental communication, a social science and humanities transdiscipline that understands communication as a powerful force at a time of human-generated ecological and climatic crises. She is particularly known for cultural approaches to studying how communication shapes ecological understandings, identities, and actions. Her work tends to discourses that otherwise go unnoticed, to connections between discourses and wider destructive or restorative practices, and to paths toward sustainable, just, and regenerative futures. Her research spans the globe, illustrating tensions between overarching and marginalised environmental meaning systems, examining ecotourism and environmental activism, and establishing the study of ecocultural identities. Milstein's Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020, co-editor José Castro-Sotomayor) gathers 40 international interdisciplinary authors to bring the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of the self. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and is the 2020 recipient of the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Architecture Dean's Research Award for Society Impact.
As a member of UNSW's Environment & Society Group, Milstein serves as convenor of the Master of Environmental Management, a program focused on nourishing tomorrow's change-makers in restoratively rethinking and reshaping the world. She is dedicated to transformative ecopedagogy, and is co-editor of Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (Routledge, 2017), founder of the "inside-out classroom," and served as her former institution's University Presidential Teaching Fellow. Milstein has taught at universities in Australia, the United States, Italy, China, and New Zealand. Before coming to UNSW, she was associate professor of Geography & Environmental Studies and Environmental Communication at the University of New Mexico. In her previous professional life, she was a print and public radio journalist.
She is co-founder and co-lead for (Daily) Delight~Disrupt, a research-informed public movement project to ignite everyday experiences of ecocentric transformation (affiliated with the global Massive Change Network): https://linktr.ee/dailydelightdisrupt
Internationally, Milstein is Conference Chair for the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) 2025 Conference on Communication and Environment, which will convene for the first time in the southern hemisphere (Tasmania). She also serves on several journal editorial boards, including flagship journals in the field such as Environmental Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Communication Monographs.
As a member of UNSW's Environment & Society Group, Milstein serves as convenor of the Master of Environmental Management, a program focused on nourishing tomorrow's change-makers in restoratively rethinking and reshaping the world. She is dedicated to transformative ecopedagogy, and is co-editor of Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (Routledge, 2017), founder of the "inside-out classroom," and served as her former institution's University Presidential Teaching Fellow. Milstein has taught at universities in Australia, the United States, Italy, China, and New Zealand. Before coming to UNSW, she was associate professor of Geography & Environmental Studies and Environmental Communication at the University of New Mexico. In her previous professional life, she was a print and public radio journalist.
She is co-founder and co-lead for (Daily) Delight~Disrupt, a research-informed public movement project to ignite everyday experiences of ecocentric transformation (affiliated with the global Massive Change Network): https://linktr.ee/dailydelightdisrupt
Internationally, Milstein is Conference Chair for the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) 2025 Conference on Communication and Environment, which will convene for the first time in the southern hemisphere (Tasmania). She also serves on several journal editorial boards, including flagship journals in the field such as Environmental Communication, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, and Communication Monographs.
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Books by Tema Milstein
"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 planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."
You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966
Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o
Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/
Table of Contents
Introducing Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, & Eric Morgan
Section One: (Re)conceptualizing the Environmental Communication Classroom
Chapter 1. From Negotiation to Advocacy: Linking Two Approaches to Teaching Environmental Rhetoric. Garret Stack and Linda Flower
Chapter 2. Pedagogy as Environmental Communication: The Rhetorical Situations of the Classroom. Jessica Prody
Chapter 3. Environmental Communication Pedagogy: A Survey of the Field. Joy Hamilton and Mark Pedelty
Chapter 4. Breathing Life into Learning: Ecocultural Pedagogy and the Inside-Out Classroom. Tema Milstein, Maryam Alhinai, José Castro, Stephen Griego, Jeff Hoffmann, Melissa M. Parks, Maggie Siebert, and Mariko Thomas.
Section Two: Diverse Practices in Teaching Environmental Communication
Chapter 5. The Role of Social Constructionism as a Reflexive Tool in Environmental Communication Education. Lars Hallgren
Chapter 6. "Deep Impressions": The Promise and Possibilities of Intercultural Experiential Learning for Environmental Literacy and Language Attitudes. Aaron Philips
Chapter 7. Further Afield: Performance Pedagogy, Fieldwork, and Distance Learning in Environmental Communication Courses. Mark Pedelty and Joy Hamilton
Chapter 8. Arts-Based Research in the Pedagogy of Environmental Communication. Geo Takach
Chapter 9. Developing Visual Literacy Skills for Environmental Communication. Antonio Lopez
Chapter 10. Teaching Environmental Journalism Though Distance Education. Gabi Mocatta
Section Three: Transformative Practice: Nurturing Change Agents
Chapter 11. Changing Our Environmental Future: Student Praxis Through Community Inquiry. Eli Typhina
Chapter 12. Storytelling as Action. Mairi Pileggi and Eric Morgan
Chapter 13. Insider Windows in Nepal: A Critical Pedagogy for Empowering Environmental Change Agents. Grady Walker
Chapter 14. Repair Cafés - Reflecting on Materiality and Consumption in Environmental Communication. Sigrid Kannengießer
Chapter 15. Cultivating Pride: Transformative Leadership and Capacity Building in the Rare-UTEP Partnership. Carlos A. Tarin, Sarah D. Upton, Stacey K. Sowards, Kenneth C. C. Yang
Section Four: Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Toolbox
Chapter 16. "Moral Vision Statement" Writing Assignment Instructions for Students. Carrie P. Freeman
Chapter 17. Environmental Privilege Walk: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Tema Milstein and Stephen Griego
Chapter 18. An Experiential Approach to Environmental Communication. Emily Plec.
Chapter 19. Greening Epideictic Speech. Jake Dionne
Chapter 20. Praxis-based environmental communication training: Innovative activities for building core capacities. Bridie McGreavy, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Leah Sprain, Jessica L. Thompson, Laura Lindenfeld
Chapter 21. Image(ination) and Motivation: Challenging Definitions and Inspiring Environmental Stakeholders. Mary Stroud
Chapter 22. Using Infographics. Antonio Lopez
Chapter 23. News Media Analysis. Carrie P. Freeman
Chapter 24. Newschart Assignment. Karey Harrison
Chapter 25. Speaking for/to/as Nature. Maggie Siebert
Chapter 26. Creating Emotional Proximity with Environment. Maria Clara Valencia
Chapter 27. Growing up with Animals (on screens). Gabi Hadl
Chapter 28. The Student-Run Environmental Communication Blog. Katherine Cruger
Journal Articles by Tema Milstein
female, particularly visible through movements such as School Strike for
Climate (SS4C). Given the pressing need for embracing and
broadcasting ecocentric ways of communicating, identifying, and
behaving in these times – when impacts of anthropogenic climate and
environmental crises are increasingly apparent – the ecocultural
discourses such activists produce for public audiences are of utmost
importance. The present study illuminates ways leading young women
activists produce ecocentric identities within their principal online
channel of public communication, the social media platform Instagram.
We identify six predominant values central to these activists’ ecocentric
identities: collective over individual action, intersectionality, climate
optimism, corporate and political responsibility, ethics of care, and
more-than-human connection. We also illustrate ways activists
operationalize these values via three main material-symbolic identity
activations: holding governments and industries accountable and
responsible for their role in the climate crisis; creating inclusive, diverse
communities; and fostering emotional responses to the more-than-human
world. While activists under study also produce their ecocentric
identities in the physical world – for instance, through on-the-ground
protest leadership – their online identity production communicates
shared values and actions in intimate, powerful, and potentially
transformative ways to mass global audiences.
If you'd like to read the whole article, please message or email me for the pdf.
Free full article eprint (please message me if these run out and I'm happy to share the pdf): https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GWVGQHSHYNF7WRXAZ9QC/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2189081
A free full article can be accessed at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SI8QBSCCRRPJZMJQEVFH/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2199946. Once these run out, interested readers are encouraged to contact me for the full pdf.
Open Access: http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/blooming-in-the-doom-and-gloom-bringing-regenerative-pedagogy-to-the-rebellion_2020_04/
Abstract: 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 enter a maturity phase that coincides with the planet experiencing an unprecedented anthropogenic moment of reckoning – a time when more broadly engaging and transformative activism is paramount to reconfiguring ecological, societal, and spatial orientations. We focus on Sea Shepherd, a global ocean protection organization founded in the same decade as many other formatively radical organizations, to examine its historic and current representations of its direct action stance; its multiple and at times conflicting positioning of cetaceans; its emphasis on celebrity and timely campaigns; and its longstanding military, war, and piracy framing – much of which has garnered attention based on appealing to news values of conventional media outlets. We illustrate ways direct action may be framed as in opposition to current extractive practices (against framing) or as a collaborative means to thriving futures (with framing) and consider ways activism frames might eschew violent clashes and celebrity long valued by conventional media outlets and speak more to today’s broader internet-savvy populations and to the reconfigurative potential of guardianship, interconnectedness, and nurturance."
“When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” is the seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical free write exercise developed by Tema Milstein (Milstein, Alhinai, Castro-Sotomayor, Griego, Hoffmann, Parks, Siebert & Thomas, 2017) to illuminate and open up for questioning and transforming our cultural assumptions, embodied meanings, and social constructions associated with the idea of “nature.” A free write is an activity that channels one’s stream of consciousness. Once given the prompt, you write without self-editing. Nonstop. No pauses to think. Keep the movement flowing. Feel it going through your fingers up to your wrist. Consciously embody your meaning, if only for a short while —the exercise lasts between three to five minutes. In Milstein’s exercise, participants then read over what they have written, looking for one term they feel answers what “nature” means to them, and they then recite that word aloud each after the other in a river of words. The exercise’s goal is to foster learning about sustainability that starts from within and moves outward. The river of words that results allows participants to identify their own ways of knowing “nature” and then to explore diverse and similar ways of thinking, feeling, and representing “nature,” including those that perpetuate dominant Western and industrial societies’ human/nature and society/nature binaries and those that represent lesser heard but ever enduring and reviving ecocentric ways of knowing.
In an open discussion that follows, learners address the nuances and power of meanings of “nature” by responding to some guiding questions, including: How difficult is it to put “nature” into words? How about one word? How do your chosen words represent our understanding and relationships with “nature”? Would it be different if instead of “nature” in this free write prompt, we used “environment,” “resource,” or “Gaia”? If, you could come up with a different word for “nature” that might relay more sustainable ways of knowing, what word would that be? The free write and the subsequent discussion encourage both awareness and examination of dominant, alternative, and counter ecocultural meanings embedded within ourselves and our societies and also create a transformative space in which to reconsider our relations within what Abram (1996) generatively terms the more-than-human world.
Inspired by and in answer to our experience with this educational exercise, we sought to explore a wide spectrum of current ecocultural relations through the creative methodology and expression of performance. We use compound terms such as “ecoculture,” “humanature,” and “humanimal,” and phrases such as “with/in/as ‘nature’” to discursively enmesh human and “nature” as they are in life (Milstein, 2012; Milstein, Anguiano, Sandoval, Chen, & Dickinson, 2011; Milstein & Dickinson, 2012). This creative scholarly discourse is itself a performance of symbolic action, an ongoing attempt at meaning-making and practice shifting. Accordingly, we reengaged the same free write as our entry point to initiate individual pieces and then interwove these into an intersubjective and responsive 35-minute group performance. Though some of us had significant experience in performance, the majority had none. Creating our performance challenged our beliefs and boundaries within and outside ourselves. In addition to stretching our comfort zones and modes of expression, the process allowed us to reflect in new ways on different environmental knowings, identities, and positionalities that continuously work in tandem, and at times in conflict, in our scholarship and personal lives. After exploring our own —as well as some oppositional— perspectives of “nature,” seeking interactions among our pieces provided generative catalysts, allowing us to develop more nuanced and multidimensional understandings of the ecocultural complexity spawned by different backgrounds, childhoods, access levels, travels, homes, humanature interactions, and the many other infinite layers that make us all multifaceted beings. In the creative process, our ways of dwelling in the world became more exposed and our understandings of humans with/in/as “nature” were challenged.
From this intimate struggle sprouted mutual recognition, albeit not without difficulty or tension. In this performance, environmental ideologies often hidden behind the veil of common sense, political posturings, or disciplined concealments emerge, intersect, and crash. Writing our pieces revealed beliefs and values we did not know we had, and the process led us to explore those ecocultural systems of meaning we cannot extricate from dominant anthropocentric ideologies as well as those we feel may illuminate contours of sustainable, restorative, and regenerative ways of knowing and being.
Below, we first present the script of our resulting performance of “When I say ‘nature.’” We then reflect on how writing and acting transformed us personally, and to what extent the performance was and continues to be essential to our ways of learning and teaching about sustainability, and of knowing and walking the Earth today and in the future. We close with insights on how movements, emotions, and multiple voices and personas coalesced in the learning process of performing environmental meanings and knowledges, and how this embodied education transformed us as Earthlings.
We first performed this piece as a peer reviewed performance at the 2015 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) in Boulder, CO, USA, in response to the international conference’s theme that year: “Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication” (you can access the recording here). We then performed the piece outdoors for students at the University of New Mexico in spring 2016 and, with just one of us performing a solo part, in spring 2017. The script is our inquisitive wonders engaging with deeper embodied insights to heal via reconnecting in a communal spirit and fostering imaginations that emerged as radically transformative, thus insinuating the need for a more nuanced and free scholarship. Performing it attuned us with the wider world and showed us the value of art as liberating pedagogic activism.
"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 planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on ways all identities are ecocultural and on the multiple and unspooling ways identities evolve and transform and, in so doing, may support reciprocal surviving and thriving."
You may enjoy the following podcasts on the book:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/ecocultural-identity/13311966
Climactic:
https://omny.fm/shows/climactic-1/gretchen-miller-tema-milstein-routledge-handbook-o
Custodians of the Planet:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/custodians-of-the/the-routledge-handbook-of-OuhdqzASWG-/
Table of Contents
Introducing Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Tema Milstein, Mairi Pileggi, & Eric Morgan
Section One: (Re)conceptualizing the Environmental Communication Classroom
Chapter 1. From Negotiation to Advocacy: Linking Two Approaches to Teaching Environmental Rhetoric. Garret Stack and Linda Flower
Chapter 2. Pedagogy as Environmental Communication: The Rhetorical Situations of the Classroom. Jessica Prody
Chapter 3. Environmental Communication Pedagogy: A Survey of the Field. Joy Hamilton and Mark Pedelty
Chapter 4. Breathing Life into Learning: Ecocultural Pedagogy and the Inside-Out Classroom. Tema Milstein, Maryam Alhinai, José Castro, Stephen Griego, Jeff Hoffmann, Melissa M. Parks, Maggie Siebert, and Mariko Thomas.
Section Two: Diverse Practices in Teaching Environmental Communication
Chapter 5. The Role of Social Constructionism as a Reflexive Tool in Environmental Communication Education. Lars Hallgren
Chapter 6. "Deep Impressions": The Promise and Possibilities of Intercultural Experiential Learning for Environmental Literacy and Language Attitudes. Aaron Philips
Chapter 7. Further Afield: Performance Pedagogy, Fieldwork, and Distance Learning in Environmental Communication Courses. Mark Pedelty and Joy Hamilton
Chapter 8. Arts-Based Research in the Pedagogy of Environmental Communication. Geo Takach
Chapter 9. Developing Visual Literacy Skills for Environmental Communication. Antonio Lopez
Chapter 10. Teaching Environmental Journalism Though Distance Education. Gabi Mocatta
Section Three: Transformative Practice: Nurturing Change Agents
Chapter 11. Changing Our Environmental Future: Student Praxis Through Community Inquiry. Eli Typhina
Chapter 12. Storytelling as Action. Mairi Pileggi and Eric Morgan
Chapter 13. Insider Windows in Nepal: A Critical Pedagogy for Empowering Environmental Change Agents. Grady Walker
Chapter 14. Repair Cafés - Reflecting on Materiality and Consumption in Environmental Communication. Sigrid Kannengießer
Chapter 15. Cultivating Pride: Transformative Leadership and Capacity Building in the Rare-UTEP Partnership. Carlos A. Tarin, Sarah D. Upton, Stacey K. Sowards, Kenneth C. C. Yang
Section Four: Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice Toolbox
Chapter 16. "Moral Vision Statement" Writing Assignment Instructions for Students. Carrie P. Freeman
Chapter 17. Environmental Privilege Walk: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Tema Milstein and Stephen Griego
Chapter 18. An Experiential Approach to Environmental Communication. Emily Plec.
Chapter 19. Greening Epideictic Speech. Jake Dionne
Chapter 20. Praxis-based environmental communication training: Innovative activities for building core capacities. Bridie McGreavy, Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Leah Sprain, Jessica L. Thompson, Laura Lindenfeld
Chapter 21. Image(ination) and Motivation: Challenging Definitions and Inspiring Environmental Stakeholders. Mary Stroud
Chapter 22. Using Infographics. Antonio Lopez
Chapter 23. News Media Analysis. Carrie P. Freeman
Chapter 24. Newschart Assignment. Karey Harrison
Chapter 25. Speaking for/to/as Nature. Maggie Siebert
Chapter 26. Creating Emotional Proximity with Environment. Maria Clara Valencia
Chapter 27. Growing up with Animals (on screens). Gabi Hadl
Chapter 28. The Student-Run Environmental Communication Blog. Katherine Cruger
female, particularly visible through movements such as School Strike for
Climate (SS4C). Given the pressing need for embracing and
broadcasting ecocentric ways of communicating, identifying, and
behaving in these times – when impacts of anthropogenic climate and
environmental crises are increasingly apparent – the ecocultural
discourses such activists produce for public audiences are of utmost
importance. The present study illuminates ways leading young women
activists produce ecocentric identities within their principal online
channel of public communication, the social media platform Instagram.
We identify six predominant values central to these activists’ ecocentric
identities: collective over individual action, intersectionality, climate
optimism, corporate and political responsibility, ethics of care, and
more-than-human connection. We also illustrate ways activists
operationalize these values via three main material-symbolic identity
activations: holding governments and industries accountable and
responsible for their role in the climate crisis; creating inclusive, diverse
communities; and fostering emotional responses to the more-than-human
world. While activists under study also produce their ecocentric
identities in the physical world – for instance, through on-the-ground
protest leadership – their online identity production communicates
shared values and actions in intimate, powerful, and potentially
transformative ways to mass global audiences.
If you'd like to read the whole article, please message or email me for the pdf.
Free full article eprint (please message me if these run out and I'm happy to share the pdf): https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GWVGQHSHYNF7WRXAZ9QC/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2189081
A free full article can be accessed at: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SI8QBSCCRRPJZMJQEVFH/full?target=10.1080/17524032.2023.2199946. Once these run out, interested readers are encouraged to contact me for the full pdf.
Open Access: http://www.susted.com/wordpress/content/blooming-in-the-doom-and-gloom-bringing-regenerative-pedagogy-to-the-rebellion_2020_04/
Abstract: 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 enter a maturity phase that coincides with the planet experiencing an unprecedented anthropogenic moment of reckoning – a time when more broadly engaging and transformative activism is paramount to reconfiguring ecological, societal, and spatial orientations. We focus on Sea Shepherd, a global ocean protection organization founded in the same decade as many other formatively radical organizations, to examine its historic and current representations of its direct action stance; its multiple and at times conflicting positioning of cetaceans; its emphasis on celebrity and timely campaigns; and its longstanding military, war, and piracy framing – much of which has garnered attention based on appealing to news values of conventional media outlets. We illustrate ways direct action may be framed as in opposition to current extractive practices (against framing) or as a collaborative means to thriving futures (with framing) and consider ways activism frames might eschew violent clashes and celebrity long valued by conventional media outlets and speak more to today’s broader internet-savvy populations and to the reconfigurative potential of guardianship, interconnectedness, and nurturance."
“When I say ‘nature,’ I mean…” is the seemingly simple prompt for a pedagogical free write exercise developed by Tema Milstein (Milstein, Alhinai, Castro-Sotomayor, Griego, Hoffmann, Parks, Siebert & Thomas, 2017) to illuminate and open up for questioning and transforming our cultural assumptions, embodied meanings, and social constructions associated with the idea of “nature.” A free write is an activity that channels one’s stream of consciousness. Once given the prompt, you write without self-editing. Nonstop. No pauses to think. Keep the movement flowing. Feel it going through your fingers up to your wrist. Consciously embody your meaning, if only for a short while —the exercise lasts between three to five minutes. In Milstein’s exercise, participants then read over what they have written, looking for one term they feel answers what “nature” means to them, and they then recite that word aloud each after the other in a river of words. The exercise’s goal is to foster learning about sustainability that starts from within and moves outward. The river of words that results allows participants to identify their own ways of knowing “nature” and then to explore diverse and similar ways of thinking, feeling, and representing “nature,” including those that perpetuate dominant Western and industrial societies’ human/nature and society/nature binaries and those that represent lesser heard but ever enduring and reviving ecocentric ways of knowing.
In an open discussion that follows, learners address the nuances and power of meanings of “nature” by responding to some guiding questions, including: How difficult is it to put “nature” into words? How about one word? How do your chosen words represent our understanding and relationships with “nature”? Would it be different if instead of “nature” in this free write prompt, we used “environment,” “resource,” or “Gaia”? If, you could come up with a different word for “nature” that might relay more sustainable ways of knowing, what word would that be? The free write and the subsequent discussion encourage both awareness and examination of dominant, alternative, and counter ecocultural meanings embedded within ourselves and our societies and also create a transformative space in which to reconsider our relations within what Abram (1996) generatively terms the more-than-human world.
Inspired by and in answer to our experience with this educational exercise, we sought to explore a wide spectrum of current ecocultural relations through the creative methodology and expression of performance. We use compound terms such as “ecoculture,” “humanature,” and “humanimal,” and phrases such as “with/in/as ‘nature’” to discursively enmesh human and “nature” as they are in life (Milstein, 2012; Milstein, Anguiano, Sandoval, Chen, & Dickinson, 2011; Milstein & Dickinson, 2012). This creative scholarly discourse is itself a performance of symbolic action, an ongoing attempt at meaning-making and practice shifting. Accordingly, we reengaged the same free write as our entry point to initiate individual pieces and then interwove these into an intersubjective and responsive 35-minute group performance. Though some of us had significant experience in performance, the majority had none. Creating our performance challenged our beliefs and boundaries within and outside ourselves. In addition to stretching our comfort zones and modes of expression, the process allowed us to reflect in new ways on different environmental knowings, identities, and positionalities that continuously work in tandem, and at times in conflict, in our scholarship and personal lives. After exploring our own —as well as some oppositional— perspectives of “nature,” seeking interactions among our pieces provided generative catalysts, allowing us to develop more nuanced and multidimensional understandings of the ecocultural complexity spawned by different backgrounds, childhoods, access levels, travels, homes, humanature interactions, and the many other infinite layers that make us all multifaceted beings. In the creative process, our ways of dwelling in the world became more exposed and our understandings of humans with/in/as “nature” were challenged.
From this intimate struggle sprouted mutual recognition, albeit not without difficulty or tension. In this performance, environmental ideologies often hidden behind the veil of common sense, political posturings, or disciplined concealments emerge, intersect, and crash. Writing our pieces revealed beliefs and values we did not know we had, and the process led us to explore those ecocultural systems of meaning we cannot extricate from dominant anthropocentric ideologies as well as those we feel may illuminate contours of sustainable, restorative, and regenerative ways of knowing and being.
Below, we first present the script of our resulting performance of “When I say ‘nature.’” We then reflect on how writing and acting transformed us personally, and to what extent the performance was and continues to be essential to our ways of learning and teaching about sustainability, and of knowing and walking the Earth today and in the future. We close with insights on how movements, emotions, and multiple voices and personas coalesced in the learning process of performing environmental meanings and knowledges, and how this embodied education transformed us as Earthlings.
We first performed this piece as a peer reviewed performance at the 2015 Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) in Boulder, CO, USA, in response to the international conference’s theme that year: “Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication” (you can access the recording here). We then performed the piece outdoors for students at the University of New Mexico in spring 2016 and, with just one of us performing a solo part, in spring 2017. The script is our inquisitive wonders engaging with deeper embodied insights to heal via reconnecting in a communal spirit and fostering imaginations that emerged as radically transformative, thus insinuating the need for a more nuanced and free scholarship. Performing it attuned us with the wider world and showed us the value of art as liberating pedagogic activism.
in the context of their own campus.
listening within these same cultures, this chapter argues that active relating can help incite shifts from anthropocentric to ecocentric ecocultural identities. We illustrate how: (1) relational knowledge and protections of endangered marine mammals stemmed from the public understanding them as speaking for themselves; (2) practitioners in the sciences and arts hear and amplify plants, fungi, and lichen as agentic; (3) scientists searching
for extraterrestrial intelligence investigate humpback whale communication to translate life in the universe; (4) researchers monitoring wildfire/bushfire recovery listen to forests; and (5) “citizen story-telling” and podcasting conveys and strengthens more-than-human attunement through the power of story and ecosonics. These examples illuminate efforts to understand interspecies and ecocentric identification and open space for discussions
on attunement that can bring restorative change and catalyze ecocentric transformation in both environmental communication research and practice.
For a pdf of this award-winning chapter, message or email me.
Intro paragraph: 'As teachers in the relatively new, but increasingly in-demand field of environmental communication, we often find ourselves introducing first-time courses to our departments, programs, and organizations. This chapter argues that, as we design courses, we also have the related opportunity and connected imperative to turn conventional learning inside-out. Indeed, this book as a whole provides a crucial moment to reflect on ways many environmental communication teachers are doing just that and a moment to further refine these practices. In this chapter, we elucidate an inside-out
classroom model (Milstein 2015) for teaching environmental communication, as well as environmental studies and the many related fields of learning. The model takes up Cox’s (2007) ethical duty of environmental communication within the realm of pedagogy, teaching learners about our current global anthropogenic ecological systemic crisis from a communication standpoint while empowering them to be ecocultural change agents. The goal with such an approach is to create transformative learning spaces in which learners’ inner concerns and passions find vital connection with their understandings of, and practices within, the wider biosphere.'
Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes.
Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality.
Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities.
Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere.
Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division.
For a 20% discount on the paperback edition of the book, enter the code FLE22 at checkout.'
-- Tema Milstein
"If we are going to save the planet, Tema Milstein says we need to start hugging trees. Westernised humans tend to believe they are separate from nature, which shapes thinking and actions toward the environment. But seeing the world with humans at its centre has massive ramifications – from climate crisis to mass extinction. What stands in the way of more of us remembering we are embedded in the natural world and its intricate networks? And how do we override anthropocentrism, and start seeing ourselves as one with the flowers?"
Talk and interview with Ann Mossop
Dancer/choreographer Rhiannon Newton and associate professor of environment & society Tema Milstein discuss the role of the arts, embodiment, Indigenous knowledge, and storytelling in how we make sense of our relations within the more-than-human world.
Drawing attention to utopian and dystopian approaches, they discuss the idea of ecocultural identity and how this might help us understand how humans are already always entangled with their environment and other lifeforms. Thinking through how people express, perform, or hide a sense of one-ness or connectivity with non-human life, they consider how we are disciplined by practices of spectatorship in theatres, theme parks, and the wild.
Activators Series of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Chunky Move dance company
Polarised views dominate discussion on critical issues such as climate crisis and biodiversity protection. Typically, the left calls for more environmental protections, and the right claims these protections threaten economic prosperity or individual rights.
The election of the Biden administration raised hopes of a new dawn in environmental protections. Our research, however, suggests entrenched left-right views will continue to stymie effective environmental action in the United States – just as they do in Australia.
That’s because focusing on localised protections or individual rights leaves intact a cultural blind spot that conceals systemic issues threatening nature. Tackling these issues requires confronting environmental damage to which we all contribute.
"If we are going to save the planet, we need to start hugging trees. Westernised humans tend to believe they are separate from nature, which shapes thinking and actions toward the environment. But seeing the world with humans at its centre has massive ramifications – from climate crisis to mass extinction. What stands in the way of more of us remembering we are embedded in the natural world and its intricate networks? And how do we override anthropocentrism, and start seeing ourselves as one with the flowers?"
Tema Milstein is an Associate Professor of Environment and Society in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney. Milstein is a Fulbright scholar and the 2020 Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture’s recipient of the Dean’s Award for Research (Society) Impact. Her work explores how cultural meaning systems shape our ecological understandings, identities, and actions. Milstein's recently published Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (with co-editor José Castro-Sotomayor) gathers 40 international authors from across disciplines to bring the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of the self. In her previous professional life, she was a newspaper and public radio journalist.
Drawing from her time studying the whale and dolphin-watching industry in locations around the word, she discusses how this industry forms a microcosm of human-nature relations – providing sites where people actively perform and at times entrench their perception and relations with the more-than-human world. She coined the term performer metaphor, identifying one of the ways that westernized people tend to speak and think about nature using an entertainment metaphor. This is applied to everything non-human, including the inanimate: from whales to flowers to storms.
As a way of identifying “the limits of our stories” – our culturally-ascribed understandings of the nonhuman world – Tema refers to those ineffable moments of connection with other animals that leave people literally without words. These moments illustrate “the boundaries of our ecocultural toolbox”, revealing ways that we can, and perhaps ought to, probe, challenge and dismantle these boundaries.
Tema’s fascinating work demonstrates how communication directly affects our perception of the more-than-human world and mediates our relations with other animals. Her explorations open up a new realm of possibilities as we entertain relational alternatives, and as we begin to listen to whales and dolphins as being storytellers themselves.