The assembled panelists are all interdisciplinary artists who use innovative, collaborative methods to illuminate complex environmental issues. They help dismantle the anthropocentric worldview by giving visual form to tragedies like biodiversity loss and human displacement, enabling viewers to see the costs of anthropocentric thinking and grasp the stakes of maintaining the status quo. At the same time, these artists model ecocentric thinking and practical skills that are necessary for building a more sustainable, equitable future. While trained in traditional visual art disciplines, they stay open to new technologies and frequently leverage digital media to reach large audiences while reducing waste and minimizing the use of natural resources. To varying extents, they trade permanent, physical art objects for more ephemeral works that strive to exist in symbiosis with natural ecosystems. These artists also demonstrate skillful collaboration with scientists, writers, activists, and community members to create tools of environmental communication and generate impactful dialogues. This panel is intentionally diverse in terms of generational and cultural perspectives and in terms of career stage, allowing for rich discussion on how artists can effect positive change.

Chair: Claire Konkes Engaged approaches to environmental communication recognize the value of including “many voices” for addressing questions about just and sustainable futures. The multiplicity of voices, and of participants, ecosystems, perspectives and worldviews, methods, and intended outcomes, constitute core commitments and are also some of the most pressing challenges related to engagement. The co-authors on this panel find value in connecting across ecological and engaged approaches to environmental communication for identifying ways to attend to multiplicity and work through differences and challenges in participatory, collaborative, and field-based methods. This panel seeks to deepen connections between ecological, place-based thinking and engaged approaches to methods and to more fully address considerations related to ethics, cultural and other forms of difference, and interdisciplinary collaboration and pedagogy.

Chair: Norie Singer Food--how we grow, produce, transport, market, and talk about what we eat and attendant environmental impacts--is a common theme across these papers that explore connections between agricultural production consumption and formations of identity.

Chair: Barb Willard Environmental documentaries can have a big impact on audiences and broader cultural formations. This panel investigates dimensions of this important visual communication genre, including examples from YouTube, Bangladesh, and Japan.

Chair: Bruno Takahashi This panel presents case studies from Pakistan, Ireland, and South Asia, along with a broader cross-country analysis, as these scholars attempt to illuminate possibilities and challenges associated with media coverage of science and environmental issues such as climate change.

Chair: Marilyn DeLaure Art has always been a fertile medium for social activism. In the context of environmental issues, art and artists are using innovative means to express their views. This panel looks at a variety of settings in which this interplay between art and activism can be seen.

Accounting for Past Violence and Narrating a Humane Future This year’s conference call asked us to consider the relationship between voice and the “many injustices of the past and present” as we endeavor to narrate “just and sustainable futures.” The purpose of this roundtable discussion is to explore strategies for engaging nonhuman voices, specifically animal voices, in these narrative constructions and encounters. Drawing upon their expertise in environmental studies, communication, rhetoric, and critical animal studies, participants will discuss what animal communication can tell us about our present capacity for justice and sustainability. In addition, we will recount several forms of past and present violence against animals that must not continue into the future if we are to create the "just and sustainable futures" we envision. In the introduction to Voice and Environmental Communication, Peeples and Depoe (2014) express the concern that important voices are going unheard in matters of critical environmental importance. Nowhere is the “unheard voice” more prominent than in our disciplinary and societal rejection of animal voices. To the extent that communication is considered an internatural endeavor, it is so at the fringes of the field. Most environmental communication scholarship is not attuned to the manner in which the more-than-human world communicates, but rather how we humans use symbols to articulate environmental understandings, secure adherence to policies or perspectives, and build communities of commitment to environmental causes. The roundtable participants seek to expand the conversation. fomenting future scholarship, teaching and activism aimed at centering animal voices, animal experiences, and animal ethics in environmental decision-making.

Chair: Ann Jabro Via case studies drawn from northeast Portugal, the New England coastline, a watershed in Maine, and the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, panelists will present a variety of findings pertaining to the role public participation can and should play in environmental decision-making.

Boxed lunch.