Multispecies Discourse Analysis

Draws on a sociolinguistic study of sea turtle tourism and conservation in Hawai‘i to chart an innovative approach to the role of discourse and communication in mediating human-wildlife relations.

This book explores how language and communication shape the increasingly entangled lives of people and sea turtles at the nexus of sea turtle conservation and ecotourism. Here, new ecocultural identities are taking shape as people strive to make sense of their shifting multispecies landscape, and as sea turtles gradually reclaim beaches after decades of absence. The book offers researchers in ecolinguistics and related ecologically engaged fields in discourse analysis an integrative theoretical and methodological approach to empirically investigate the human and ‘more-than-human’ discourses and practices shaping problematic human-wildlife interaction. Containing short vignettes in each chapter covering the biology and behaviours of sea turtles, this book suggests how discourse analysts might contribute to a ‘life-sustaining multispecies ethics’ in an uncertain socio-ecological time increasingly being referred to as the Anthropocene.