Of the various aspects of place research, the realm of place meaning seems to have the most resonance with communications scholarship. Place meanings represent a distinctive yet highly fluid and ever-changing whole that includes the person, the environment, and the experience within a locale. Conversations and information exchange with others are the processes through which place meanings are shaped. One could consider meanings as akin to stories or narratives about places rather than simple descriptions of physical properties of a place. These are narratives as embodied descriptions, stories illuminating experience.
Simply put, meanings answer the question of “what kind of place is this?” rather than a question of “how much” do I like (or dislike) this place. The question of “how much,” incidentally, gets us back into the psychometric territory of place-attachment. But today let us stick within the realm of meaning.
Many of you probably realize how personal connections to land come through in the stories that are told about meaningful places. These anecdotes convey something more than basic evaluative attitudes. Stories emphasize the relationship between a group or person and a place and are often constructed through the use of metaphors. Manuel Castells, in his hefty tome Communication Power, refers to metaphor as the most important protocol of communication. Metaphors help define social roles within their respective social contexts. Again, I am sure this is something that many of you have understood intuitively. The significance of how and why people respond to both environmental beauty and environmental threat come through in the symbolic stories they tell about the places they love or the places they fear to lose. By extension, the stories you tell, which re-configure and re-contextualize those first-hand personal narratives into a broader narrative arc to convey meaning for your audience, are based upon the metaphor and symbolism inherent in the language used by your interview subjects.
As it happens, this process enacts two of my favorite philosophical lines of inquiry: hermeneutic phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. But we don’t need to go there. I digress.
Given the important translational role a journalist or public affairs person plays, one of telling a story as true to life as possible while wrapping it in the context of larger global happenings; environmental communicators can use place to root meaning in tangible, meaningful circumstances while creating emotional resonance through metaphorical imagery and, ultimately, stimulate dialogue about place protection and other acts of environmental courage.
As suggested above, one strong signal people provide regarding relationships with meaningful places is through stories. It is through personal narratives that memories develop and deeper relationships are often given voice. Though the study of narratives has not been common in the analysis of recreation and natural resource place-making, they do offer a structure and coherence that I am sure you are all familiar with as a way to communicate complex or controversial ideas to a general audience. They can also be helpful for communicating to a scientific audience, for what it’s worth. But I would like to relay a few “master narratives” that have been suggested as potentially fruitful for revealing place meanings in recreational areas. These narratives can also be employed outside of the recreation management domain. Such themes include stories of personal change or revelation, discussions of spirituality, action stories, stories centered on heroic acts, travelogues, and tales about overcoming adversity within the wilderness milieu. These stories have the potential to elicit a range of meanings about land and resources use, ownership and rights, resource protection or preservation, personal identity and/or group identity, reverence or a sense of awe, and heroism, among others.
Places, remember, are not simply the physical surroundings of space. Places are created through communication and can be seen as internalized and creative social productions that develop meaning in the telling. As such, a personal sense of place is built upon a foundational and situated self-concept that itself is a product of discourse and experience. It is informed by concepts of the self and self-in-place as influenced by social norms and the ongoing social influence of those we turn to for information and advice. In relaying basic themes reflecting people’s placed-based identifications related to where they live, what they value, and how they situate themselves in the larger environment, strategic environmental communication supplies the cognitive cornerstone for people to engage in environmental advocacy on many levels.
When sense of place is strong, it has been found useful in explaining people’s outlooks, perceptions, behavioral beliefs, capacity building, and political activity. Meanings held for particular places, as I’ve suggested, come forward through this context. These meanings are located geographically; simultaneously related to their social, economic, and cultural surroundings and give individuals what’s been called a ‘subjective territorial identity,' an ‘environmental self,’ or what influential researcher James Cantrill has termed, a ‘sense of self-in-place.'
The way people perceive their surroundings colors how, or if, they pay attention to communication about that environment. These are mental frameworks, or schema, we all use to help configure our own understanding of the world. An entire line of social science inquiry has been built around the effectiveness of framing arguments in relation to commonly held mental models or schematic interpretations of the socio-political world. Again, “framing” may be something many of you do already without calling it such. Framing is not a topic I will delve into here but suffice it to say that it is a fruitful and promising rhetorical device. It is also a powerful path to engagement given the multiplicitous media environment of today, when every story attempts to gain necessary traction through resonance with its target audience amid the din of the 24/7 newstainment industry.
Arguments that directly address personal environmental identities or self-interests, those that are place-based or “backyard” issues, are likely to be most persuasive whether it is in a policy debate or a light-hearted conversation at the local diner. Communication is likely to be more effective if it is grounded in some understanding of the extent to which people’s place-based identities are generally associated with, for example, particular critical habitats or protected or at-risk species. For topics as diffuse and seemingly distant from many American’s daily concerns as climate change, clear simple metaphors and imagery that resonates with established schema, and framed in a way to entice more elaborate processing, will be helpful for generating understanding among audiences unfamiliar with a given topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment