Area of Specialization: Nature

My work is grounded in a commitment to help illuminate ways out of the current humanature crisis – transformations from dominant binary ideologies and mastery practices, of humans as separate from and superior to nature, to ways of thinking, communicating, acting, and being as humans living in cooperative interdependence within nature. My analysis is cultural, critical, and deeply grounded in community and ecological needs.

Current Research: 

I’m currently working on two major research projects:

1. Connected Community Voices: I'm principal investigator for a collaborative, community-based participatory action research project with Conservation Voters of New Mexico, The Wilderness Society, UNM Resource Center for Raza Planning, and Arts de Aztlan, for which I recruited a team of graduate students. We have been working with rural and urban Hispanic communities to help identify their environmental meaning systems and to aid these communities to have a stronger voice in environmental politics and policy. We are in publication stage.

2. For the past several years, I have been engaging a long-term ethnographic study focused on the interplay of communication, tourism, and endangered wildlife at the Canada-U.S. Pacific border. My study is centrally concerned with the ways communication in this controversial international tourism setting constructs views of and actions toward endangered whales and their ecosystems. Starting in 2012, this study expands to include an examination of marine ecotourism in New Zealand.

Sample Honors:
•      Fulbright Scholar. Research on ecotourism and sustainability in New Zealand. January-June 2012.
•      Christine L. Oravec Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Environmental Communication. National Communication Association. 2009.
•      Top Papers in Environmental Communication. National Communication Association. 2010, 2006.
•      Top Paper in Environmental Communication. Western States Communication Association. 2011.

Sample Published Works:
•      Milstein, T., Anguiano, C., Sandoval, J., Chen, Y.W., & Dickinson, E. (2011). Communicating a “new” environmental vernacular: A sense of relations-in-place. Communication Monographs. 78 (4), 486-510.
•      Milstein, T. (2011). Nature identification: The power of pointing and naming. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. 5 (1), 3-24.
•      Milstein, T. (2009). Environmental communication theories. In Stephen Littlejohn and Karen Foss (eds.). Encyclopedia of Communication Theory (pp. 344-349). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
•      Milstein, T. (2009). ‘Somethin’ tells me it’s all happening at the zoo:’ Discourse, power, and conservationism. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. 3 (1), 25-48.
•      Hall, D., Bernacchi, L., Milstein, T., & Peterson, T.R. (2009). Calling all artists: Moving climate change from my space to my place. In D. Endres, L. Sprain, & T.R. Peterson (eds.) Social movement to address climate change: Local steps for global action (pp. 53-80). Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
•      Sprain, L., Norton, T., & Milstein, T. (2009). Step It Up! and image politics in the Pacific Northwest. In D. Endres, L. Sprain, & T.R. Peterson (eds.) Social movement to address climate change: Local steps for global action (pp. 281-308). Amherst, NY: Cambria Press.
•      Milstein, T. (2008). When whales “speak for themselves”: Communication as a mediating force in wildlife tourism. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. 2 (2), 173-192. (2009 Christine L. Oravec Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Environmental Communication)
•      Milstein, T. (2008). The nature inside our heads: Exploring possibilities for widespread cultural paradigm shifts about nature. Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (Sustainability Issue), 10.
•      Milstein, T. (2007). Human Communication's Effects on Relationships with Animals . In Marc Bekoff (ed.) Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals. (Vol. 3, pp. 1044-1054). Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.