Books by Joshua Trey Barnett
These days, earthly coexistence often feels bad. As environmental crises amass, they cast a shado... more These days, earthly coexistence often feels bad. As environmental crises amass, they cast a shadow over an imagined future and the promises of better—or at least predictable—days to come. In times of climate chaos, mass extinction, and rampant environmental injustice, it is easy to despair. But, here and there, a glimmer of joy or optimism shines forth and reminds us that it is possible—even necessary—to love and to hope amid the ruins.
The contributors to this volume grapple with a plurality of interrelated ecological feelings: care, concern, contempt, empathy, fear, grief, hope, joy, numbness, optimism, possessiveness, regret, and saudades. Informed by a rhetorical perspective, the essays collected here reveal what sets our ecological feelings into motion. Crucially, they also uncover some of the rhetorical practices through which we might collectively feel our way into a more harmonious earthly coexistence.
Michigan State University Press, 2022
Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to gri... more Enormous ecological losses and profound planetary transformations mean that ours is a time to grieve beyond the human. Yet, Joshua Trey Barnett argues in this eloquent and urgent book, our capacity to grieve for more-than-human others is neither natural nor inevitable. Weaving together personal narratives, theoretical meditations, and insightful readings of cultural artifacts, he suggests that ecological grief is best understood as a rhetorical achievement. As a collection of worldmaking practices, rhetoric makes things matter, bestows value, directs attention, generates knowledge, and foments feelings. By dwelling on three rhetorical practices—naming, archiving, and making visible—Barnett shows how they prepare us to grieve past, present, and future ecological losses. Simultaneously diagnostic and prescriptive, this book reveals rhetorical practices that set our ecological grief into motion and illuminates pathways to more connected, caring earthly coexistence.
Journal Articles by Joshua Trey Barnett
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2024
Within and beyond the field of communication, invocations of "care" are rising. In this brief ess... more Within and beyond the field of communication, invocations of "care" are rising. In this brief essay, I complicate how scholars of communication relate to care as a feeling, practice, ethics, and politics in two ways. First, I uncover several complexities inherent to carecare's partiality, relation to neglect, and frequent entanglement with violence/harm. Second, I suggest that scholars of communication should bring our distinctive theoretical and methodological insights to bear on the questions about care. Rather than treating care as an unquestioned good, I propose instead that we embrace care's messiness. Doing so, however, may require that we unthink care.
Essays in Philosophy, 2023
Braiding personal narratives and philosophical meditations, throughout this essay I reflect on wh... more Braiding personal narratives and philosophical meditations, throughout this essay I reflect on what it means to care for more-thanhuman others when doing so often leaves us utterly compromised and when the broader conditions under which we coexist on earth with others are themselves antithetical to ecological continuity. Ecologically, the essay is situated in the midst of Cook Forest, an 8,500-acre public park in northwest Pennsylvania, where ancient eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) find themselves imperiled by the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), an aphid-like insect native to east Asia. Considering responses to the adelgid at Cook Forest, I engage in a series of philosophical and ethical meditations about ecological care-about its complicities and its conditions of (im)possibility. And, finally, in conversation with Theodor Adorno and Judith Butler, I reflect upon how critique and resistance might open onto still more radical modes of ecological care.
Journal of Ecohumanism, 2023
In the Western imaginary, care has long been pictured as a distinctly human activity-an activity ... more In the Western imaginary, care has long been pictured as a distinctly human activity-an activity undertaken primarily by women-and the paradigmatic image of caregiving has been that of a mother tending to her child. Increasingly, though, both the matricentricity and the anthropocentricity of care are being scrutinized as scholars advocate for more egalitarian and, in a few cases, more ecological conceptions of care. Examples of more-than-human care have been sparse, however, which hampers our collective capacity to imagine care beyond the human. Thus, in this essay I look for imaginative resources in forest ecologist Suzanne Simard's (2021) New York Times bestselling book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. This encounter reveals two connected concepts-multispecies mothering and caring relations-and opens onto an ecological ethic of care rooted in a commitment to care for caring relations, to sustain the conditions of possibility for the care that we all need to survive and flourish.
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 2021
What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sust... more What obligations do scholars of rhetoric and public address have to understand, address, and sustain the conditions of earthly coexistence? Only if the field of rhetoric embraces a genuinely ecological notion of rhetoric, the author argues, and only if we collectively commit to addressing the ecological dimensions of our various objects of study, can we truly give back to the earth in ways that honor all that it has given, and continues to give, to us. Toward that end, this essay outlines several dimensions of an "ecocentric rhetoric."
Environmental Communication , 2021
This article presents a reading of Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge, a 2014 collection of essa... more This article presents a reading of Hemlock: A Forest Giant on the Edge, a 2014 collection of essays authored by Harvard Forest ecologists that addresses the ongoing destruction of the eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). Introduced to the eastern U.S. in the early 1950s, the hemlock woolly adelgid has been slowly but surely decimating the eastern hemlock across most of its native range. Hemlock offers an account of the species’ history of decline and recovery as well as of the Harvard Forest researchers’ relationship with this foundational species. Locating within Hemlock a rhetoric of sentiment and science, this essay first considers the authors’ embrace of ecological grief and then demonstrates how they deploy historical and long-term ecological research to channel that grief into some actions rather than others. Thus, this essay unearths how sentiment and science merge and diverge in discourses concerning ecological loss and transformation.
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 2020
Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously pe... more Oscillating between naturalistic observations and conceptual forays, this essay simultaneously performs and introduces the notion of "composing climate change" at the heart of this special issue. Spanning personal narrative, poetry, dialogue, theoretical meditation, thick description, photographic essay, and other modes of scholarly writing, the contributors to this issue experiment with genre, style, and form as they seek to describe, evoke, grasp, disclose, and otherwise imagine what it means and-crucially-what it feels like to be an earthling in a time of tremendous ecological change and profound planetary transformation.
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2021
Ethics & the Environment, 2020
Dwelling near Lake Superior in the Anthropocene, we uncover a greater intimacy and acquaintance w... more Dwelling near Lake Superior in the Anthropocene, we uncover a greater intimacy and acquaintance with our earthly responsibilities. Thoughts wash over us like waves as our thinking ebbs and flows between the fact that we must learn to dwell here while also coming to terms with the planetary implications of our very being. That ebb and flow is presented here in a series of waves, which can be read in or out of order, in an orderly or disorderly fashion. These waves crash into one another as we reflect on place, dwelling, hospitality, deep history, enchantment, wildness, and thinking itself. We discover in this mixture an invitation to think more deeply about our responsibilities by contemplating one of the other bodies with which we cohabit the earth: the deep, blue body of Lake Superior.
Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluence, 2020
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2019
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its ... more A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.-Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 1
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2019
Culture, Theory & Critique, 2019
Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue g... more Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with this question. Together, the authors contend that any attempt to understand social change must attend to the conditions of possibility for transformations of any kind, as well as the forces that condition us to feel, think, and act (differently). In these opening pages, we trace this underlying thread through to its more explicit appearances in this special issue, that is, to the attention paid by all of the authors to affect and media. We are conditioned by conditions we condition. We, the created creators, shape tools that shape us. We live by our crafts and conditions. It is hard to look them in the face.-John Durham Peters (2015: 51) An act of feeling is an encounter-a contingent event, an opening to the outside.-Steven Shaviro (2012: 63) The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with a vexing question: in a world awash in media, under what conditions is social change possible? By investigating the conditions of social change, rather than focusing solely on the substance of such changes, the authors of these essays underscore the fact that shifts in the social are always already put in play, though neither guaranteed nor determined, by forces that both precede and exceed them. Our argument is not that the thoughts, feelings or actions undertaken by individuals do not set social transformation into motion, as they surely must. Rather, these essays suggest that any analysis of social change must attend to what conditions give rise to these capacities, which are themselves so vital to the making and remaking of the worlds from which we emerge and to which we give shape. By asking specifically after the conditions of social change, we mean to draw attention to what precedes and provokes transformations of many kinds: technological, ecological, economic, political, legal, ethical, cultural, ideological and intellectual, to name a few. Condition functions in this context as both a noun and a verb. As a noun, condition typically refers to something without which something else could not exist or take place: human life without oxygen, for example, is an impossibility. But a condition is not quite the same as a cause: even though human life is unthinkable without oxygen, oxygen itself does not cause human life. One thing can also be conditioned-that is, trained, prepared, shaped, directed, moulded, habituated, acclimatised-by another. When used as a verb, condition suggests
Environmental Communication, 2019
Setting out from Jacques Derrida's assertion that every act of naming is "a foreshadowing of mour... more Setting out from Jacques Derrida's assertion that every act of naming is "a foreshadowing of mourning" ([2008. The animal that therefore I am. (M.-L. Mallet, Ed., D. Wills, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press], p. 20), this paper argues that the work of earthly coexistence is underwritten by the intertwined practices of naming and mourning. The paper demonstrates that names provide access to and shape our perceptions of earthly entities; that the act of naming prepares us for the work of mourning; that the proper names given to endlings provide poignant points of access to species on the edge of extinction; that species names disclose species as such and, thus, enable us to grieve not just particular living organisms but entire ways of life; and that the name given to the current geological epoch, the "anthropocene," simultaneously reflects and engenders a mode of awareness which enables us to relinquish those ways of being human that no longer seem sustainable and carry forth those that promise to enrich earthly coexistence.
QED: A Journal of GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2018
In a sequence of passing glimpses—at turns theoretical, personal, and analytical—this essay consi... more In a sequence of passing glimpses—at turns theoretical, personal, and analytical—this essay considers the humble but forceful glance as a vital mode of queer worldmaking. Setting out from Alex Wong’s photograph of Carson Jones conspicuously cutting eyes at Vice President Mike Pence during Doug Jones’s senatorial swearing-in on January 3, 2018, this essay explores the subjective, relational, and communal modes through which glancing exerts force. Weaving through our personal and public lives, the authors contend, glancing stitches the visual matrix from which we navigate and construct our social worlds.
Environmental Communication, 2018
An essay reviewing works by the ecological philosopher Timothy Morton.
The Ecological Citizen, 2018
Environmental Communication, 2018
This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that sha... more This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then offer three generative directions for future research related to energy transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns' strategic efforts, critically theorizing energy's transnational power dynamics, and theorizing the energy democracy movement.
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Books by Joshua Trey Barnett
The contributors to this volume grapple with a plurality of interrelated ecological feelings: care, concern, contempt, empathy, fear, grief, hope, joy, numbness, optimism, possessiveness, regret, and saudades. Informed by a rhetorical perspective, the essays collected here reveal what sets our ecological feelings into motion. Crucially, they also uncover some of the rhetorical practices through which we might collectively feel our way into a more harmonious earthly coexistence.
Journal Articles by Joshua Trey Barnett
The contributors to this volume grapple with a plurality of interrelated ecological feelings: care, concern, contempt, empathy, fear, grief, hope, joy, numbness, optimism, possessiveness, regret, and saudades. Informed by a rhetorical perspective, the essays collected here reveal what sets our ecological feelings into motion. Crucially, they also uncover some of the rhetorical practices through which we might collectively feel our way into a more harmonious earthly coexistence.