Dissertation

My dissertation, Articulating Geoengineering as Good Science: Urgency, Optimism, and Ideology in the Anthropocene, blends science and technology studies and environmental communication theory. This project explores how geoengineering, specifically solar radiation management by sulfate aerosol injection (SAI), has evolved from a fringe idea to a seemingly serious option for responding to climate change. I examined the historical, social, cultural, political-economic, and legal factors that have served as conditions of possibility in this process. I employed post-structural discourse analysis to determine how climate engineering scientists and policy-makers legitimize continued climate engineering research generally, and SAI research in particular, as valid, necessary, and beneficial to society--as well as the global implications of these arguments.

This study’s findings contribute to science and environmental communication by demonstrating how science and policy circles conceptualize what counts as “good science” and how scientists articulate this in their own work. In order to maintain democratic ideals, more voices need to be included in decision making processes, and science must be critically evaluated as both research and a form of argument. This project serves to help clarify how processes of scientific debate influence broader circles (policy makers, invested parties, and the public) and how this influences demonstrates democracy at large.

Current  Projects

• Latent climate change tensions in non-sustainability organizations: Researchers studying climate change organizing have examined sustainability and corporate social responsibility, focusing on organizations that prioritize climate change. As many different types of organizations need to address the effects and mitigation of climate change, organizations that previously didn’t see themselves as environmentally focused will now engage with climate change issues. This study contributes to organizational communication theory by highlighting how non-sustainability organizations adapt their processes in response to climate change, by exploring tensions in climate change communication within emergency response work. 

• Scientific (Dis)trust and Alternative Epistemology in Online Health Groups: This project explores why the information-sharing practices within alternative health social media groups makes these communities important spaces for analyzing and understanding the factors shaping the online spread of alternative health and health science (mis)information. Through interviews and observation of participants in alternative health groups on both Facebook and Reddit, we explore how people use health science information from government, health, and news sources, alternative health information from social media groups, and their own personal experiences and concerns to define informational (dis)trustworthiness. We identify factors that lead participants to (dis)trust health science information and explore how members assess the (dis)trustworthiness of health science information using an alternative epistemology. This alternative epistemology, or “their science,” demonstrates a trust in science unless or until it contradicts members’ experiences, beliefs, contextual concerns, or their own “research” practices.

• Union Carbide’s “Hand in Things to Come”: In response to calls from rhetoricians of science to theorize the emergence and circulation of public vocabularies of chemistry, this study employs close-reading techniques to analyze illustrated, long-form Union Carbide advertisements published in popular magazines from 1950-1963. Interrogating how the campaign's appeals organized social narratives of science, the analysis demonstrates how the campaign fostered a strategy of chemical rhetoric that fused science with ideologies of religion and environmental domination through technical and synthetic means.