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A Cartography of Roots: an Exploration of Plant Communication, Place, and Story

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A Cartography of Roots: an Exploration of Plant Communication, Place, and Story University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Communication ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 5-13-2019 A Cartography of Roots: An Exploration of plant communication, place, and story Mariko Oyama Thomas Portland State University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds Part of the Environmental Studies Commons, and the Journalism Studies Commons Recommended Citation Thomas, Mariko Oyama. "A Cartography of Roots: An Exploration of plant communication, place, and story." (2019). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cj_etds/126 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]. Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas i Mariko Thomas Candidate Communication and Journalism Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: David Weiss , Chairperson Tema Milstein Chris Duvall Miguel Gandert Jaelyn deMaria Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas ii Cartographies of roots: An Exploration of plant communication, place, and story By Mariko O. Thomas B.S. Communication, Southern Oregon University 2011 M.S. Communication & Research, Portland State University, 2014 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Communication The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico July, 2019 Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas iii Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude to this land I am lucky enough to call home, this desert that has taught me so much about what it is to belong to a place. My most emotional thanks also to every participant on this project who was willing to share the big wild intimacy of their stories with plants. Your experiences give me so much hope for humanity and the possibilities of multi-species relations. I can’t thank Tema Milstein enough for being my teacher, my advisor, my mentor and my friend throughout this process, you have left an indelible mark on the way I move through both human and more-than-human worlds and supported my beliefs that there is such thing as generous, beautiful, scholarship and playful, joyful ways of swimming through academia. Jaelyn deMaria, your gentle love of the world around you somehow seeps through the way you do research and the way your mentor. Chris Duvall and Miguel Gandert, thank you for the endless kind and wise support and guidance. The amalgamations of all three of your lived experiences have inspired me to no end, and your belief in this kind of research is what made this possible. David Weiss, you have been a tirelessly excellent chair of the department since you’ve adopted the position, a real ally to all graduate students and certainly to me. In our short time working together, you have also made me an exceedingly better writer. Thostenson, you’ve listened to my feverish ramblings of ideas for over a year now and always made me feel heard, accepted, and supported, and encouraged me to even more imaginative renderings of the Earth in this dangerously skeptical world. Little baby sea creature, you were the kick in the ass I needed to finish this and the world of possibility and connection presented by this study is the world I want for you. Also, thank you to Jackie, Maryanne, Naomi, Natalie, Kaitlin, Kalyn, Ailesha, Melissa, Micah and Derek, and most especially my mother and father, Carrie and Franke, where this all began for me. Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas iv Cartographies of roots: An Exploration of plant communication, place, and story Mariko O. Thomas B.S. Communication, Southern Oregon University 2011 M.S. Communication & Research, Portland State University, 2014 Ph.D. Communication, University of New Mexico, 2019 Abstract This study uses oral history and auto-ethnography to collect thematic data on relationships and communication between plants and people in New Mexico, USA. Western and industrial cultures tend to be plant-blind, which is extremely dangerous in the wake of climate disruption and associated loss of plant biodiversity. This study works to collect and produce a generative landscape of narratives of non-binary relationships between humans and plants. These narratives show a range of hopeful, relational connections between human and more-than-human worlds. Overall results indicated the existence of many positive relationships between plants and people in the Western world, and that these relationships develop through human-human communication, plant-human communication, place-making, and relation-making practices. Furthermore, results showed clearly how relationships between humans and plants are wrapped up in history, sense-of-place, family, and identity, positioning studies about plants and humans as an extremely potent and important subject for ecocultural studies. Keywords : Plant communication, multi-species relationships, binaries, more-than-human communication, oral history, auto-ethnography, New Mexico Dissertation: Cartographies of roots Thomas v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ iv Chapter One: Introduction...................................................................................................... 1 Definitions ............................................................................................................................................ 18 Locational Context ............................................................................................................................. 20 Chapter Two: Literature review ......................................................................................... 25 Research Question ............................................................................................................................. 26 Theoretical assumptions ................................................................................................................ 26 Environmental communication. .............................................................................................................. 27 Binaries and dualisms. ................................................................................................................................. 29 Animism and totemism................................................................................................................................ 37 Plant Communication: An Overview ........................................................................................... 40 Plant-plant-animal communication ........................................................................................................ 41 Human-human communication about plants ......................................................................... 45 Anxiety about how to classify & anxiety in general............................................................... 46 The Uses of plants .............................................................................................................................. 48 Towards a new understanding of language ............................................................................. 51 Embodiment, childhood, and indigenous pedagogy ............................................................. 56 Stories, place, and Identity ......................................................................................................................... 60 Place and space as a theoretical construct .......................................................................................... 64 Identity and place .......................................................................................................................................... 66 Stories as world-makers ............................................................................................................................. 69 Chapter Three: Methodology ............................................................................................... 73 Participants ......................................................................................................................................... 74 Data collection .................................................................................................................................... 75 A Case for cross-discipline multi-method approaches. .................................................................. 80 Oral history and auto-ethnography. ....................................................................................................... 82 Reliability and validity. ................................................................................................................................ 84 Oral history and auto-ethnography…together. .................................................................................. 86 Oral history, auto-ethnography and place. .......................................................................................... 87 Oral history and environmental communication. ...........................................................................
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