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Environmental communication : dissent, conflict, enquiry
Abstract
The thesis examines environmental communication from within an enquiry perspective. Taking my lead from the emerging literature on science communication, I argue that the communicational obligations and permissions implicit to successful science communication can be used to help develop a successful method for environmental communication. Success in environmental communication is measured in terms of how well our method enables us to inter-communicate with the being of an environment. As an environment is an evolving, dynamic process, this leads me to define environmental
communication as any communication with an environment that seeks to find out something new about an environment. This definition allows me to argue the general thesis: In order to be effective in environmental communication, we must use a method of communication that enables us to maintain an ongoing flow of dialogic enquiry with the being of an environment.
In arguing for the above position, aspects of Charles S. Peirce's semiotic logic are introduced and discussed with reference to the issue of ' environmental problems' . Environmental problems are found to be at root disconnections between the sign use of humans and the sign use of an environment. As such, person-environment disconnections are revealed by the dissent of an environment. I call dissent the first grade of environmental concern. I then argue that two additional grades of environmental concern are required to adequately address the issue of person/environmental disconnection. To reveal the social structures relevant to an environment's dissent, the dissent must be opposed by what is already known about an environment. This creates conflict, which I call the second grade of environmental
concern. To determine whether conflicts can be dissolved by new ways of thinking and acting in the world, I argue that explanations derived from environmental conflict need to be tested at a third level of concern, which I call enquiry. These three grades of
environmental concern ( dissent, conflict, enquiry) are discussed and applied to issues of enviromnental disconnection (rainforest logging and toxic pollution). It is concluded that a semiotic approach to environmental communication offers insight into how dissent, conflict, and enquiry function as a system for environmental communication.
... Given the identified trend toward engagement and collaboration, I propose that we view the work of university-community engagement as being itself a process of enquiry rather than a collection of problematically dissociated university functions. In this view, university-community engagement is transformed into a system that must continue to be responsive to the dissent of its constituency, or it does not exist (Low 2003). I define dissent as a feeling or way of thinking that opposes an accepted viewpoint, and enquiry as a method of communication that aims to find out the truth. ...
... I have derived this insight from the work of Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914). In Peirce's view, communication mediates between an independent reality and our reasoning about it (Low 2003). To demonstrate how such an approach might operate in the context of grid-group analysis, I am next going to locate four different methods of communication in Douglas' grid-group diagram. ...
University-community engagement involves complex issues, entangling multiple and interacting points of view, all of which operate in a wider dynamic evolving social environment. For this reason, there is often disagreement about why engagement is necessary or desirable, and whether there is one optimal method to practice it. To address this issue, I argue that university-community engagement can be examined as a form of enquiry. In this view, engagement is viewed as a system that arises through the recognition of the dissent it embodies. As such, enquiry functions to process disagreements into diverse methods of communication.
Most of the disagreements utilised by universities are derived from external sources, thus university-based enquiry must necessarily involve a dialogue with a broader community or environment. In this sense, university-community engagement can be viewed most generally as a method that processes disagreements into shared understandings through enquiry.
To demonstrate how university-community engagement functions from an enquiry point of view, I use Mary Douglas’ grid-group diagramming method to develop a critical typology for classifying university-community engagement. My modified grid-group diagram provides a structured typological space within which four distinct methods of university-community engagement can be identified and discussed – both in relation to their internal communicational characteristics, and in relation to each other.
The university-engagement grid-group diagram is constructed by locating each of Douglas’ four quadrants within Charles Peirce’s four methods of enquiry. Peirce’s work is introduced because each of his four methods of enquiry deals specifically with how disagreements are processed and resolved. When Peirce’s methods for fixing belief are located in Douglas’ grid-group diagram, they create a sense-making framework for university-community engagement. It is argued that the model offers a heuristic structure through which to view the diversity of university-community engagement and create shared understandings of the appropriateness of a wide range of possible engagement methods.
In this paper, I discuss the communication principles that regulate scientific enquiry and investigate why these principles have relevance to the Gandhian method of nonviolent dissent. In doing so, I argue that scientific enquiry should not be mistaken for the ways institutions legitimise and manipulate knowledge as elite power. To dissent, critique, or decline the authorised is to doubt the known. To doubt honestly and responsively in relation to a subject matter that has a being independent of our opinions about it, is, I argue, to enquire scientifically. I claim that both scientists and nonviolent activists can be viewed as enquirers in this latter sense. The common objective of both types of community is to transform and expand existing institutionalised rules for action by enquiring into the truth of things.
This article seeks rapprochement between the sociology of knowledge and philosophy of science by attempting to capture the best social constructionist insights within a strongly realistic philosophy of science. Key to doing so are (1) separating the grounds for the individual scientist coming to know that P from those grounds for socially credentialing the claim that P within the relevant scientific subcommunity and (2) showing how truth considerations can enter into the analysis of knowledge without interfering with social constructionist treatments of credentialing claims. A detailed epistemology and associated account of the social credentialing of knowledge claims are presented. Close attention is paid to the epistemological and social aspects of (a) the nature and role of observation reports, (b) the interpretation of data, (c) simplifications, idealizations, and approximations, and (d) the nature of replication. The article contains a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remote-sensing case study and a detailed analysis of replication in the 1881–1933 Michelson-Morley-Miller interferometer ether studies.
After having examined EU citizenship and the European Union as a governance system in the two preceding chapters, in this final chapter of Part I, I will now go through the question of participatory democracy in order to complete the review of thematizations on the European democratic experiment and to examine how such thematizations take into account the existence of organizations of active citizenship. “Participatory democracy” is indeed the most commonly used expression, along with satellite-formulas such as “civil dialogue”, in the European Union as a means of transmitting the idea of the involvement of citizens’ organizations (usually taken as a type of organization within a wider set variously—and confusingly—named as “non-governmental organizations”; “not-for-profit organizations”; “stakeholders”; “interest groups” or “civil society”) in the system of European governance.