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

在当代美国，环境保护话语的特点是社会群体在感知信仰和价值观方面存在深刻分歧。此外，这些关于保护的论述，无论是在学术界还是在普通人群中，往往侧重于广泛的社会类别，如意识形态归属和社会经济地位，而忽略了当地社区更复杂的观点。这个项目通过强调美国农村利益相关者的观点来解决这一差距，他们构成了一个庞大而非常活跃的保护活动群体，在保护方面有着悠久的历史渊源。因此，他们是环境意识形态和实践中语言和身份调查的关键焦点，他们与保守主义和环境保护的联系表明需要对保护话语进行社区层面的分析。这项研究将有助于在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相关者之间建立合作关系。美国西部的农村人口在人类学和其他研究自然保护的社会科学中还没有得到充分的研究，而这项提议的研究将与一个为农村受众服务的自然保护组织合作完成，它将为学术界和自然保护的讨论带来新的、经常被忽视的声音。这项研究也是环境科学跨学科领域的及时补充。本研究结果将对提高文化人类学和语言科学的稳健性和可靠性作出重要贡献。在加州大学圣巴巴拉分校的玛丽·布霍尔茨博士的指导下，杰西卡·勒夫·尼科尔斯将测试有关对话话语和听者感知的理论在受到地理和社会语言学风格差异影响时是否可靠。为了确保分析符合农村社区的观点，将采用混合方法收集数据。研究人员将首先通过访谈和参与者观察记录来收集和分析民族志数据，这将确保随后的定量数据收集和分析植根于对社区意识形态和实践的理解。将通过对猎人教育课程、狩猎和捕鱼活动的参与观察以及对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学感知任务的实验数据。参加者将聆听一些与环保有关的音频片段。在其中一个版本的剪辑中，说话者会使用一种听起来更“乡村”的说话方式。在另一种情况下，他们将以非农村的形式阅读信息。对于每个音频片段，参与者将被要求回答几个调查问题，评估他们对演讲者的态度和看法，测试假设，即当采取支持保护的立场时，与乡村社会语言学一致的片段将被认为更真实，因此更值得信赖。在完成调查后，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一个被忽视的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各种各样的受众接触。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.