Woody biomass energy has exponentially grown in the last decade as a renewable energy alternative to fossil fuels. The growing trend of burning trees amid global climate crisis suggests that the wood pellet industry has been grossly successful in positioning itself as a sustainability leader. What communicative frames and strategies has the industry harnessed to communicate sustainability? What do the frames and strategies leave out? To explore those questions, this paper examines the woody biomass industry’s construction of sustainability by focusing on the case of the world’s largest wood pellet company, Enviva. Following ecolinguistics and framing theory, the first part of the paper examines the company’s website and social media presence to unpack the frames that Enviva engages to communicate its sustainability. Then, the paper turns to the spheres of life that the company omits from its framing but are crucial to the conceptualization of sustainability from an ecojustice perspective. The paper concludes with a call for ecojustice as the framework for evaluating sustainability of life on land.

This study examines the ways widely circulated U.S. newspapers have articulated the idea of “speciesism” and its associated idea “animal rights” in relation to “racism” to understand how powerful news media helps to shape the public understanding of the interlocking systems of oppression that cuts across the human and the more-than-human world. The archives (1987 to 2023) of three U.S. newspapers – The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post – were analyzed, using qualitative content analysis. The ideas of articulation, symbolic annihilation, erasure, and discursive closure served as the analytical guides for the analysis. The analysis shows that there is gross underrepresentation of speciesism and even far less representation of the relationship between speciesism and racism and between animal rights and anti-racism. When represented, the articulations showed problematic patterns of erasure of those concepts and relationships. The paper ends with the implications of the findings.

This chapter calls for critical intercultural communication to examine the ways in which social injustice due to racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression is entangled with human violence against the more-than-human world. Industrial factory farming of non-human animals is used as a case study to discuss the relationship between racism and speciesism and to advocate for critical intercultural communication to account for the intersection between the two.

This book examines the discursive formation of nuclear power in Japan to provide insights into the ways this technology has been both promoted and resisted, constituting and being constituted by Japan's sociocultural landscape. Each chapter pays close attention to a particular discursive site, including newspaper editorials, public relations campaigns, local site fights, urban antinuclear activism, and post-Fukushima pronuclear and antinuclear articulations. The book also raises the question of democracy and sustainability through the examination of nuclear power discourses. It demonstrates the power of discourse in shaping nuclear power by creating knowledge, influencing decisions, relationships, identity, and community. Readers will gain a range of insights from the book: prominent articulations on nuclear power discourse, state and corporate strategies for enticing consent for controversial facilities and technologies, the power of the media in framing public knowledge, the role of social movements and activisms in civic society, the power of community, and nuclear power as a problematic in representative democracy and sustainability. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in social discourse, social movements, Japanese society, cultural studies, environmental communication, media analysis, energy and sustainability, and democracy, among others.

Given the fact that being vegan is generally considered odd or deviant from the mainstream norms of carnism, we examine how vegans manage such social positioning in their dealings with omnivores. This article employs a discursive analysis of vegans’ narratives of problematic moments with omnivores and how they manage such situations and their identity. The vegans’ narratives ranged from problem stories where some troublesome event occurred, but was not resolved, to solution stories of the best ways of dealing with meat eaters. In each case, being vegan is a social positioning that is problematized in various ways and a positioning that needs to be accounted for. The narrators give voice to themselves or others through the discursive practices of metadiscourse and reported speech in constructing the problem story. Vegans face the ideological dilemma in how to speak about their veganism as choice of diet, for environmental reasons or ethical considerations.

As the pandemic of COVID-19 shut down the world and people were ordered to stay home and social distance from each other, the world turned to social media to share all sorts of information about the pandemic and related topics, giving rise to infodemic or ‘an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it’ (: 2). Besides the overwhelming amount of information about the virus and its treatment, COVID-19 infodemic includes a copious volume of information about the environment. Many of the stories that spread on social media reported improvements to the environment, and this was attributed to human absence. This article will reflect on these stories and their implications from an ecological perspective with several questions in mind: how is the environment constructed in social media in relation to the pandemic, and what are their implications?; what may be overlooked in the infodemic on the environment, and why does that matter? My reflection addresses and problematizes the prevalence of dualism in the ways the environment is constructed in the widespread environmental stories in the context of the pandemic.

Intercultural communication and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) have formed a fruitful partnership over the last decade. However, both stand at a juncture with exciting possibilities and imperatives for growth as the fields reflect on their overwhelming emphasis on deconstructive critiques and largely anthropocentric inquiry. In a recent work, S. Lily Mendoza and I argued that (critical) intercultural communication must go beyond its exclusive attention to anthropocentric concerns and begin to approach identity, culture, and intercultural communication from an ecologically grounded perspective. One part of this move is the need for examining culture, communication, and interculturality with critical eyes on the ways anthropocentrism shapes and organizes them, and another part is engaging and exploring alternatives. Building on this argument, this essay will discuss the potential of CDA in playing an integral role in the ecological turn in the study of intercultural communication. With rapidly deteriorating ecological health as an urgent context, CDA has already begun to take an ecological turn as marked by the articulation of ecolingustics as CDA. This essay presents a discussion of ecolingustics as a promising lens through which to examine intercultural communication.

This paper calls for a "fifth moment" in the field of intercultural communication that re-examines modern culture's values, beliefs, and assumptions about human being in the world and the role of such in fomenting today's ongoing planetary-wide ecological crises. To conduct this re-examination, we turn to ethnoautobiography, a framework rooted in story and in the indigenous paradigm. We raise deep questions regarding the default assumptions of a discipline ensconced almost exclusively within the monocultural logic of modern culture and civilization. We end by posing key problematics that we deem crucial for renewing the discipline toward contemporary relevance, ecological awareness, and responsibility.

The Fukushima nuclear meltdown in March 2011 led the majority of the Japanese to support a phase-out of nuclear power. Yet, nuclear energy has become so interwoven with the social, economic, and political fabric of the Japanese society that its termination requires considerable structural and ideological changes to the society and the culture of Japan. This article examines 4 articulations that helped to shape Japan's pronuclear discourse and maintain its hegemonic status. I discuss the ways in which a variety of discursive practices were deployed to articulate nuclear power as virtuous, absolutely safe, necessary, and environmentally friendly.

Using critical discourse analysis, this study examined news media's representation of Mexican immigrants. Sixty articles were analyzed from the Internet sites of ABC, CBS, and NBC news to uncover the ways in which Mexican immigrants and their stories are represented in the news articles and the kinds of discursive strategies used to create the articulations. The analysis of the articles focused on a variety of discursive strategies such as topicalization, omission, register, connotation, individuation versus collectivization in verbal and visual components of the articles. The analysis led to the emergence of 5 tones by which the online network news portray Mexican immigrants-empathetic, sympathetic, informative, impersonal, and opposing. The article discusses these tones in detail and in comparison to previous studies of news media representation of immigrants. It concludes with implications of problematic representations that were recurrent in the news articles.

This chapter contains sections titled: Theoretical Framework Japanese Diaspora Multiple Layers of Nikkei Nikkei Articulations: Nurturing the Tie to the Ethnic Homeland Conclusion References

This essay examines post-migration identity of the Montagnard men who came to the United States as refugees. In particular, given the salience of home to identity, interview participants' notions of home space are explored. Findings are discussed first in terms of emotional, relational, sociocultural and political significance of home spaces that were identified by the participants. Then, the articulations of home are discussed in terms of implications they have for the current post-migration theories of cross-cultural adaptation and diaspora. The Montagnard men's experiences with and views of home shed light on applicability and limitations of the theories.