Elizabeth A. Dickinson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor in
Communication, Salem College Adjunct Instructor in Education
and Oceanography, Nova Southeastern University |
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CONTACT INFORMATION Dr.
Elizabeth Dickinson Assistant
Professor Communication
Department Salem
College 601 South Church Street Winston-Salem, NC
27101 Adjunct
Instructor Fischler School of
Education Oceanographic
Center Nova
Southeastern University Virtual E-mail:
eadickins@gmail.com Website: www.unm.edu/~edickins
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PROFILE I am an Assistant Professor in Communication at Salem College, a private liberal arts college
for women in
North Carolina. I research and teach in the areas of communication, culture,
and environmental/ecocultural communication. I also teach M.S.-level courses
through Nova Southeastern
University’s Environmental Education and Oceanography programs. In 2010,
I earned my Ph.D. in Communication from the Department of Communication at
the University of New Mexico. RESEARCHs My scholarship centers on
qualitative, rhetorical, and critical research in two flows of inquiry that
often meet: environmental/ecocultural
communication and culture and communication, and increasingly, the
rhetorical/cultural production of space/place, dialectics, environmental
education, and environmental justice. What connects this work is a focus on
the perceptual, ecological, and relational effects of cultural systems and
practices. Working within and between the
critical, sociocultural, and rhetorical traditions in communication research,
I seek to: a) understand how meaning is created
in social interaction b) examine the role of culture and
context in how meaning is constructed, and c) question and critique the
taken-for-granted systems, power structures, and ideologies that dominate
society I incorporate qualitative, rhetorical, and critical
approaches and methodologies, including participant observation,
interviewing, ethnography, textual analysis, rhetorical criticism, and
critical methodologies. In the area of environmental/ecocultural
communication, I examine the social construction of nature,
commercialized and consumer conceptualizations of nature, environmental education, environmental
dialectics, space/place, and the epistemologies of science, politics, and
ecological knowledge. In the area of culture
and communication, I study how cultural ideologies are produced,
consumed, performed, and resisted through communication and discourse. My goal
is to examine how humans construct and produce knowledge and meaning about
the natural world and how practices, histories, systems, and power influence
human-nature relations. For
publications, working papers, and projects, click here. DISSERTATION Title: Constructing, Consuming,
and Complicating the Culture-Nature Binary: Communication Practices in Forest
Environmental Education Description: I conducted a 5-month
study in the North Carolina Educational State Forest system, where I used
participant observation to investigate conservationist and science-based
forest environmental education practices. I examined the strategies of and
contexts surrounding forest conservation education and how they shape how
visitors can come to understand, consume, and contest framings of nature.
Specifically, I explored the dominant framings of nature that are promoted by
rangers, teachers, forestry, curriculum, and larger cultural and political
beliefs. Click
here for the abstract and table of contents. Manuscripts from Dissertation: Dickinson,
E. (2011). Displaced in nature: The cultural production of (non-) place in
place-based forest conservation pedagogy. Environmental
Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 5(3), 300-319. [PDF] * 1st
Place Top Paper in Environmental Communication, WSCA (2011) Dickinson, E. (revise &
resubmit). The
misdiagnosis: Rethinking “nature-deficit disorder.” Environmental
Communication: A Journal of Nature
and Culture Milstein,
T., & Dickinson, E. (revise & resubmit). Gynocentric
greenwashing: The discursive gendering of nature. Communication, Culture & Critique. * 1st
Place Top Paper in Environmental Communication, ICA (2012) Dickinson,
E. (under review). Ecocultural schizophrenia: Dialectical environmental
discourses and practices. Communication
Theory. Dickinson, E. (in process). The strange case
of the interrupting bird: Negotiating and complicating ecopedagogical meaning
systems BACKGROUND I was born and raised in Southern California. After earning a B.A. in
Organizational Communication from California
State University San Bernardino, I completed my M.A. from New Mexico State University with an emphasis
in Intercultural Communication and Social Change. I taught English in Aomori,
Japan for two years through the JET Program before moving to Los Angeles
where I worked in marketing. I taught communication in Beijing through the
University of Colorado Denver’s ICB program at China
Agricultural University. I worked at a nonprofit in San Diego before moving
to Miami where I was a communication instructor at Florida International University and Miami-Dade College. Before joining Salem
College in 2011, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico in the
Department of Communication and Journalism. I have experience in academic,
nonprofit, business, and intercultural settings. |
The
trouble with the maples they're right) “The Trees” by Rush |
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“The
primary human reality is persons in conversation.”¯ (Ron
Harre, 1983) |
Website
developed and maintained by Elizabeth Dickinson Send
e-mail to: eadickins@gmail.com Modified:
February, 2012 |
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