Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sociolinguistic Style and Discourses of Conservation Among Rural American Stakeholders

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

In the contemporary United States, environmental conservation discourse is characterized by deep divides in the perceived beliefs and values across social groups. Moreover, these discourses about conservation, both within academia and the general population, often focus on broad social categories, such as ideological affiliation, and socioeconomic status, and ignore the more complex perspectives of local communities. This project addresses that gap by highlighting the viewpoints of rural American stakeholders, who constitute a large and very active group in conservation activities, with historically deep roots to conservation. They are therefore a crucial focus for the investigation of language and identity in environmental ideologies and practices, and their ties to both conservatism and environmental conservation demonstrate the need for community-level analyses of conservation discourse. This research will contribute to a more inclusive understanding of conservation in several ways. First, the research will assist scholars and practitioners in communicating science to the public. Moreover, this project will also create a collaboration between the academy and rural western stakeholders. Rural populations in the western United States are understudied within anthropology and the other social sciences that study conservation, and the proposed study, which will be completed in collaboration with a conservation organization that serves a rural audience, will bring new, and often overlooked, voices into the academy and into discussions of conservation. The study is also a timely addition to the interdisciplinary field of environmental science. Findings from this study will make important contributions to improving the robustness and reliability of cultural anthropological and linguistic science. Jessica Love-Nichols, under the supervision of Dr. Mary Bucholtz of the University of California at Santa Barbara, will test whether theories concerning conversation discourse and listener perception are reliable when subject to variance in geography and sociolinguistic style. In order to ensure that the analysis is relevant to the perspectives of the rural communities, a mixed-methods approach will be used for data collection. The researcher will first collect and analyze ethnographic data through interviews and recorded participant observation, which will ensure that the subsequent quantitative data collection and analysis are rooted in an understanding of the ideologies and practices of the community. Ethnographic data will be collected through participant observation of hunter education courses and hunting and fishing activities, and interviews with sportsmen and women. Experimental data from a sociolinguistic perception task will then be collected and analyzed. Participants will listen to several conservation-related audio clips. In one version of the clips, the speakers will use a more "country"-sounding (i.e. rural) way of speaking. In another, they will read the message in a non-rural guise. For each audio segment, participants will be asked to answer several survey questions evaluating their attitudes and perceptions of the speaker, testing the hypothesis that clips which are sociolinguistically-aligned with rurality will be perceived as more authentic and hence more trustworthy when a pro-conservation stance is taken. After completing the survey, speakers will be given the opportunity to express longer opinions in written form. Findings from this research will expand understandings of the conservation values and practices of an overlooked community and will assist scholars and practitioners interested in conservation in engaging with a wide variety of audiences. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.