Discourse and rhetorical analysis approaches to environment, media, and communication

Rhetorical citizenship and the environment

“…Some do so by working from ideological or critical approaches towards destabilizing dominant discourses and systems of power (Peeples, 2015, p. 41). In particular, scholars of critical rhetoric have been occupied with challenging dominant ideologies of anthropocentrism to “address ongoing environmental crises that are rooted in these systems of power” (Endres, 2020, p. 327).…”

“…Rhetorical approaches to environmental communication are occupied with understanding particular texts, symbolic acts and discursive practices’ constitutive and instrumental functions (Peeples, 2015; Peterson et al., 2016; Pezzullo & Cox, 2018). The instrumental functions refer to actors’ strategic use of rhetoric to influence attitudes and decisions about the environment.…”

“…I argue that this generational accusation functions to redefine the role of children and youth in the political community and can be seen as a means by which the youth craft rhetorical agency for their group. By doing so, I wish to draw attention to how the evaluation of rhetorical practices must always attend to their particular context and emphasize that the rhetorical strategies of marginalized actors may often be judged differently than the actions of those in power (Peeples, 2015, p. 43).…”

“…The instrumental functions refer to actors' strategic use of rhetoric to influence attitudes and decisions about the environment. The constitutive functions refer to how the words, names and concepts we use when we speak about environmental issues contribute to creating and shaping the very phenomenon they address, thereby influencing how people experience, relate to and act in 2 The overview is by no means exhaustive and can be supplemented with overviews found in Cox & Depoe (2015), Endres (2020), Peeples (2015), Pezzullo (2016;, Pezzullo & Cox (2018) and Wolrath Söderberg (2020).…”

“…From the beginning, rhetorical perspectives have been central to Environmental Communication scholarship (Cox & Depoe, 2015;Peeples, 2015). Among other things, early contributions to the field explored the rhetorical strategies of preservationists and rhetorical contestations over preservation and conservation (Oravec, 1981(Oravec, , 1984Peterson, 1986), the replacement of social reasoning with technical reasoning in public responses to environmental accidents (Farrell & Goodnight, 1981) and the deployment of "the locus of irreparable" in environmental argumentation (Cox, 1982).…”