Cultural Discourses of Dwelling: Investigating Environmental Communication as a Place-based Practice

In this essay, we contribute a response to intellectual and practical problems by presenting a perspective on environmental communication that is reflexively grounded in place. The perspective is designed to explore human relations with nature, while embracing cultural and linguistic variability. Our goals are to introduce a way to think through communication to places, and further to link that understanding to issues of engaged environmental action, to deeply seated notions of identity, and to the affective dimension of belonging that place-based communication often brings with it. Our way of doing this is to theorize and study cultural discourses of dwelling, which we explicate theoretically, then further illustrate by analyzing the discourse of adult-onset hunters. Our discussion concludes by exploring not only environmental speaking, but listening environmentally.