Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sociolinguistic Style and Discourses of Conservation Among Rural American Stakeholders

博士论文研究：美国农村利益相关者的社会语言风格和保护话语

• 批准号: 1824063
• 负责人: Mary Bucholtz
• 金额: $ 1.51万
• 依托单位: University of California-Santa Barbara
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-07-01 至 2020-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1824063&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Sociolinguistic; Style

In the contemporary United States, environmental conservation discourse is characterized by deep divides in the perceived beliefs and values across social groups. Moreover, these discourses about conservation, both within academia and the general population, often focus on broad social categories, such as ideological affiliation, and socioeconomic status, and ignore the more complex perspectives of local communities. This project addresses that gap by highlighting the viewpoints of rural American stakeholders, who constitute a large and very active group in conservation activities, with historically deep roots to conservation. They are therefore a crucial focus for the investigation of language and identity in environmental ideologies and practices, and their ties to both conservatism and environmental conservation demonstrate the need for community-level analyses of conservation discourse. This research will contribute to a more inclusive understanding of conservation in several ways. First, the research will assist scholars and practitioners in communicating science to the public. Moreover, this project will also create a collaboration between the academy and rural western stakeholders. Rural populations in the western United States are understudied within anthropology and the other social sciences that study conservation, and the proposed study, which will be completed in collaboration with a conservation organization that serves a rural audience, will bring new, and often overlooked, voices into the academy and into discussions of conservation. The study is also a timely addition to the interdisciplinary field of environmental science. Findings from this study will make important contributions to improving the robustness and reliability of cultural anthropological and linguistic science. Jessica Love-Nichols, under the supervision of Dr. Mary Bucholtz of the University of California at Santa Barbara, will test whether theories concerning conversation discourse and listener perception are reliable when subject to variance in geography and sociolinguistic style. In order to ensure that the analysis is relevant to the perspectives of the rural communities, a mixed-methods approach will be used for data collection. The researcher will first collect and analyze ethnographic data through interviews and recorded participant observation, which will ensure that the subsequent quantitative data collection and analysis are rooted in an understanding of the ideologies and practices of the community. Ethnographic data will be collected through participant observation of hunter education courses and hunting and fishing activities, and interviews with sportsmen and women. Experimental data from a sociolinguistic perception task will then be collected and analyzed. Participants will listen to several conservation-related audio clips. In one version of the clips, the speakers will use a more "country"-sounding (i.e. rural) way of speaking. In another, they will read the message in a non-rural guise. For each audio segment, participants will be asked to answer several survey questions evaluating their attitudes and perceptions of the speaker, testing the hypothesis that clips which are sociolinguistically-aligned with rurality will be perceived as more authentic and hence more trustworthy when a pro-conservation stance is taken. After completing the survey, speakers will be given the opportunity to express longer opinions in written form. Findings from this research will expand understandings of the conservation values and practices of an overlooked community and will assist scholars and practitioners interested in conservation in engaging with a wide variety of audiences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在当代美国，环境保护话语的特点是不同社会群体在感知的信仰和价值观上存在深刻分歧。此外，在学术界和普通民众中，这些关于保护的论述往往侧重于广泛的社会类别，如意识形态联系和社会经济地位，而忽视了当地社区更复杂的视角。该项目通过突出美国农村利益相关者的观点来解决这一差距，他们是一个在保护活动中非常活跃的大型群体，历史上对保护有着深厚的根基。因此，它们是研究环境意识形态和实践中的语言和身份的关键焦点，它们与保守主义和环境保护的联系表明，有必要对保护话语进行社区层面的分析。这项研究将有助于从几个方面更全面地理解保护。首先，这项研究将帮助学者和实践者向公众传播科学。此外，该项目还将在学院和西部农村利益攸关方之间建立合作。人类学和其他研究保护的社会科学对美国西部的农村人口研究不足，拟议中的研究将与一个服务于农村受众的保护组织合作完成，它将为学院和保护讨论带来新的、往往被忽视的声音。这项研究也是对环境科学跨学科领域的及时补充。这项研究的发现将对提高文化人类学和语言学的稳健性和可靠性做出重要贡献。Jessica Love-Nichols在加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的Mary Bucholtz博士的指导下，将测试有关会话话语和听者感知的理论在地理和社会语言风格变化的情况下是否可靠。为了确保分析与农村社区的观点相关，将采用混合方法收集数据。研究人员将首先通过访谈和录制的参与者观察来收集和分析人种学数据，这将确保随后的量化数据收集和分析植根于对社区意识形态和实践的理解。将通过参与观察猎人教育课程和狩猎和捕鱼活动，以及与运动员和妇女的访谈来收集民族志数据。然后将收集和分析来自社会语言感知任务的实验数据。参与者将听取几个与保护有关的音频片段。在一个版本的视频中，说话者将使用更具乡村气息(即乡村)的说话方式。在另一种情况下，他们将以非农村的名义阅读这条信息。对于每个音频片段，参与者将被要求回答几个调查问题，评估他们对说话者的态度和看法，以检验这样一个假设，即在社会语言上与乡村风格一致的片段会被认为更真实，因此当采取支持保护环境的立场时更值得信任。完成调查后，演讲者将有机会以书面形式表达更长的意见。这项研究的结果将扩大对被忽视社区的保护价值和实践的理解，并将帮助对保护感兴趣的学者和实践者与广泛的受众接触。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

“Tied to the Land”: Climate Change Activism Among U.S. Hunters and Fishers

“与土地息息相关”：美国猎人和渔民的气候变化行动主义

• DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2020.00001
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: Frontiers in Communication
• 影响因子: 2.4
• 作者: Love-Nichols, Jessica