Emma Frances Bloomfield
Biographic Data
| ID | 2215931 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emma Frances Bloomfield |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emma Frances |
| FAMILY NAME | Bloomfield |
| SIGNATURE | BLOOMFIELD E F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nevada, Las Vegas |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6211-4471 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Mothers as Science Storytellers
Explores how scientific meaning and decision-making are filtered through the stories we tell about science and through our social, cultural, and personal identities. Focusing on mothers as a prominent and important identity in science communication, this Element explores both the obstacles and the opportunities for public engagement with scientific topics. After providing an overview of the nexus of science communication, stories, and identities,…
Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Climate Emotions: Stories from Nevada
An interdisciplinary team surveyed 1560 Nevadans about their climate concerns. Using qualitative coding of open-ended responses, analysis revealed three aggregate themes in how Nevadans communicated their climate concerns: 1) variation in abstraction related to temporal and spatial proximity of concern, 2) shared concern that the window of opportunity is closing to take meaningful action, and 3) variation in emotional responses including and beyo…
Web Archives and Historicizing Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Medicine: Reflecting on Some Pragmatic and Ethical Considerations
Bad Arguments, Bad Science, and Bad Consequences: A Response to an Anti-Trans Keynote
The generative persona: Reprograming rhetoric in an age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fundamental challenge to rhetoric, agency, and humanity. We argue that AI reveals how empowered audiences have created new post-human agencies beyond the speaker and the audience that we call the generative persona. This persona, forged in the ashes of what was once called the “author,” is unhinged from earthly coexistence and social accountabilities, because it exists as an ideal manifestation of its audiences’ …
Digital Climate Rhetoric and the Corrupted Scientist Archetype
Social media platforms are prominent arenas for the circulation of climate change discourse, both scientific and skeptical. Watts Up With That (WUWT) is a blog and Facebook community that is a central node in the climate skeptical network. We collected WUWT Facebook posts using BirdSong Analytics and used iterative coding informed by theories of credibility to categorize rhetorical strategies that WUWT members use to undermine the credibility of …
Using Narrative Webs to Facilitate Effective Science Communication
Given the intertwining of story and science, this article argues that science communication is always already an act of storytelling making it suitable for narrative analysis. However, among the extensive vocabulary from narrative theories across a variety of disciplines and practices, it can be overwhelming to synthesize this information into a manageable heuristic to apply to specific stories. To rectify this gap in intention and application, t…
Engaged Scholarship in Times of Crisis
In 2021, the world was facing the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Doomsday Clock read ‘100 seconds to midnight’. In the United States, Donald Trump was ousted from the presidency, but not before he incited an attempted coup that cost several lives and entrenched political tensions. One year had passed since George Floyd’s murder ignited nationwide protests
Sarah E. Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses
Sarah E. Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses (Oxford University Press, 2021), 240 pp., $85 (hbk), ISBN: 9780198842699
Building Coalitions from Shared Pieties: Polyvocal Religious Environmentalism at the Asian Rural Institute
The Asian Rural Institute (ARI) is a Christian organization based in Tochigi, Japan that emphasizes foodlife work (working to grow food to sustain life), servant leadership, and community development. In analyzing the experiences of ARI community members, we located three themes that encapsulate ARI’s negotiation of religious environmentalism: 1) hierarchy, 2) ritual, and 3) tensions. These themes create polyvocality, or multiple voices, which we…
Rhetorical fractals: An Afrocentric analysis of #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
Derek Chauvin’s trial for murdering George Floyd was a flashpoint of public deliberation around justice, accountability, and police reform. Burkean approaches to guilt, and their corresponding Western understandings of language, can be extended through Afrocentric rhetorics. We propose the “rhetorical fractal” to encompass Black ways of knowing and communicating. Unlike a cycle that returns to its starting point, a fractal is endlessly complex an…
Care and Constraints in the Climate Crisis: An Intersectional Rhetorical Analysis of News Comments about the El Dorado Fire
In September 2020, a gender reveal party started the El Dorado Fire in southern California. We analyzed comments on news coverage of the fire from two outlets with different political leanings to evaluate how the rhetorical process of assigning guilt is influenced by interlocking systems of power, making an intersectional lens useful for analyzing responses to environmental crises. Some comments evoked scapegoat ecology, which is a response to gu…
Of Markets, Masks, and (White) Men: Mimetic Performances of Parasitic Publicity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article argues that the anti-masking and anti-vaccination subreddit community known as r/NoNewNormal is an example of a parasitic public that circulates feelings of autonomy, victimization, and militancy to advance white masculinity in the public sphere. This bundle of affects thrives parasitically on the corrosiveness of deliberative democracy and neoliberal antagonisms (e.g., mask mandates and lockdowns). We call this virulent enactment of…
Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action
Addressing climate change requires engaging with the fluid, dynamic, and amorphous narrative of humanature relationships. I view environmental rhetoric as practices of storytelling that structure reality, guide actions, and shape understanding of the environment. Through rhetorical criticism, I analyzed fragments of climate activist discourse related to the narratives’ temporal and spatial scopes. I argue that reimagining the scope of our climate…
Commemorating Disorder in After Action Reports: Rhetorics of Organizational Trauma after the Las Vegas Shooting
After-action reports are important texts that make sense of moments of crisis and restore organizational order. We add to existing research on these reports by incorporating the rhetorical concepts of terministic screens and the pentad to understand how reports commemorate disorder and organizational trauma. Analyzing the multiple reports created after the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting, we find that reports from different professional fields commemorat…
Topical Analysis of Nuclear Experts' Perceptions of Publics, Nuclear Energy, and Sustainable Futures
Nuclear energy experts consider commercial power from fission to be a strong contender to help mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, in part due to its low-to-no carbon emissions. Nevertheless, nuclear energy's history, including meltdowns such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and dumping in sacred Indigenous land such as Yucca Mountain, raises important concerns in public deliberation over nuclear power. These communi…
Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions
This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups …
Sensory Engagement with the Rhetoric of Science: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion…
Transcorporeal Identification and Strategic Essentialism in Eco-Horror: Mother! ’s Ecofeminist Rhetorical Strategies
The eco-horror film mother! tells the story of mother, who navigates a tenuous relationship with her husband, Him, while an increasing number of people invade their home. mother! deploys strategic essentialism and identification as ecofeminist rhetorical strategies to show the dual exploitation of women and nature. The character of mother is a strategic essentializing of the Mother Nature archetype, which I call “womanature,” that evokes the inte…
Where Women Scientists Belong: Placing Feminist Memory in Biography Collections for Children
For decades, feminists have observed a double bind in commemorations of women who attempt to enter male-designated places: Women must simultaneously be honored as rightfully occupying those places and yet noted as worthy of unique commendation as women. This essay examines how these challenges are negotiated rhetorically in biography collections about women scientists produced for children and adolescents. We perform a rhetorical analysis of such…
The Rhetorical Impact of the Scopes Trial's Interconnected Public Memory Places
In 1925, the Scopes Trial, one of the first legal battles over teaching evolution in public schools, was held in Dayton, Tennessee. Dayton commemorates the trial with a trinity of sites: The Scopes Trial Museum, the Scopes Trial Trail, and Bryan College. I argue that the trail connects the two other public memory places physically and symbolically, inviting visitors to follow the journey of William Jennings Bryan's death at the Scopes Trial Museu…
Framing the Anthropocene as Influence or Impact: The Importance of Interdisciplinary Contributions to Stratigraphic Classification
The designation of the Anthropocene formalizes the end of the 11,700-yearlong Holocene and the beginning of a new epoch. In the technical debates governing this transition, the stability of previous disciplinary conventions is under question, and new modes of expression and expertise are solicited to ground answers. In our examination of Anthropocene origin stories, we analyze science communication about geological designations with an emphasis o…
The Effects of Establishing Intimacy and Consubstantiality on Group Discussions About Climate Change Solutions
The many obstacles to productive climate change communication necessitate new approaches. Based on science communication strategies that promote engagement rather than knowledge transfer, we assigned participants ( N = 329) to randomized chat groups that discussed similarities between group members (intimacy condition) or information about climate change (information condition). This study combined Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and rhe…
The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook
This study uses a topical, rhetorical approach to analyze how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on the Watts Up With That and the Global Warming Policy Forum Facebook pages. These groups adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking, thus establishing a supportive, networked space among other skeptical sites, while distancing readers from original sources of scientific information. …
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics examines the intersection of climate skepticism and Christianity and proposes strategies for engaging climate skeptics in productive conversations. Despite the scientifically established threats of climate change, there remains a segment of the American population that is skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change and the urgent need for action. One of the most important stakehol…
The Effects of Establishing Intimacy and Consubstantiality on Group Discussions About Climate Change Solutions
The many obstacles to productive climate change communication necessitate new approaches. Based on science communication strategies that promote engagement rather than knowledge transfer, we assigned participants ( N = 329) to randomized chat groups that discussed similarities between group members (intimacy condition) or information about climate change (information condition). This study combined Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and rhe…
Of Markets, Masks, and (White) Men: Mimetic Performances of Parasitic Publicity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article argues that the anti-masking and anti-vaccination subreddit community known as r/NoNewNormal is an example of a parasitic public that circulates feelings of autonomy, victimization, and militancy to advance white masculinity in the public sphere. This bundle of affects thrives parasitically on the corrosiveness of deliberative democracy and neoliberal antagonisms (e.g., mask mandates and lockdowns). We call this virulent enactment of…
Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action
Addressing climate change requires engaging with the fluid, dynamic, and amorphous narrative of humanature relationships. I view environmental rhetoric as practices of storytelling that structure reality, guide actions, and shape understanding of the environment. Through rhetorical criticism, I analyzed fragments of climate activist discourse related to the narratives’ temporal and spatial scopes. I argue that reimagining the scope of our climate…
Where Women Scientists Belong: Placing Feminist Memory in Biography Collections for Children
For decades, feminists have observed a double bind in commemorations of women who attempt to enter male-designated places: Women must simultaneously be honored as rightfully occupying those places and yet noted as worthy of unique commendation as women. This essay examines how these challenges are negotiated rhetorically in biography collections about women scientists produced for children and adolescents. We perform a rhetorical analysis of such…
The Circulation of Climate Change Denial Online: Rhetorical and Networking Strategies on Facebook
This study uses a topical, rhetorical approach to analyze how climate change denial circulates online through the 25 most popular posts on the Watts Up With That and the Global Warming Policy Forum Facebook pages. These groups adopt the appearance of credibility through reposting and hyperlinking, thus establishing a supportive, networked space among other skeptical sites, while distancing readers from original sources of scientific information. …
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics examines the intersection of climate skepticism and Christianity and proposes strategies for engaging climate skeptics in productive conversations. Despite the scientifically established threats of climate change, there remains a segment of the American population that is skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change and the urgent need for action. One of the most important stakehol…
Rhetorical Constellations and the Inventional/Intersectional Possibilities of #MeToo
In this project, I analyze news coverage of the #MeToo movement to categorize how blame is assigned and what corrective actions are prescribed for the pervasive problem of sexual violence. Although it is tempting to scapegoat individuals, this practice often limits the scope of sexual violence to isolated cases. Transcendence is an alternative route to redemption that attributes blame to structural and societal forces. However, transcendence may …
Communication Strategies for Engaging Climate Skeptics: Religion and the Environment
Framing the Anthropocene as Influence or Impact: The Importance of Interdisciplinary Contributions to Stratigraphic Classification
The designation of the Anthropocene formalizes the end of the 11,700-yearlong Holocene and the beginning of a new epoch. In the technical debates governing this transition, the stability of previous disciplinary conventions is under question, and new modes of expression and expertise are solicited to ground answers. In our examination of Anthropocene origin stories, we analyze science communication about geological designations with an emphasis o…
The Effects of Establishing Intimacy and Consubstantiality on Group Discussions About Climate Change Solutions
The many obstacles to productive climate change communication necessitate new approaches. Based on science communication strategies that promote engagement rather than knowledge transfer, we assigned participants ( N = 329) to randomized chat groups that discussed similarities between group members (intimacy condition) or information about climate change (information condition). This study combined Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and rhe…
Transcorporeal Identification and Strategic Essentialism in Eco-Horror: Mother! ’s Ecofeminist Rhetorical Strategies
The eco-horror film mother! tells the story of mother, who navigates a tenuous relationship with her husband, Him, while an increasing number of people invade their home. mother! deploys strategic essentialism and identification as ecofeminist rhetorical strategies to show the dual exploitation of women and nature. The character of mother is a strategic essentializing of the Mother Nature archetype, which I call “womanature,” that evokes the inte…
Where Women Scientists Belong: Placing Feminist Memory in Biography Collections for Children
For decades, feminists have observed a double bind in commemorations of women who attempt to enter male-designated places: Women must simultaneously be honored as rightfully occupying those places and yet noted as worthy of unique commendation as women. This essay examines how these challenges are negotiated rhetorically in biography collections about women scientists produced for children and adolescents. We perform a rhetorical analysis of such…
The Rhetorical Impact of the Scopes Trial's Interconnected Public Memory Places
In 1925, the Scopes Trial, one of the first legal battles over teaching evolution in public schools, was held in Dayton, Tennessee. Dayton commemorates the trial with a trinity of sites: The Scopes Trial Museum, the Scopes Trial Trail, and Bryan College. I argue that the trail connects the two other public memory places physically and symbolically, inviting visitors to follow the journey of William Jennings Bryan's death at the Scopes Trial Museu…
Commemorating Disorder in After Action Reports: Rhetorics of Organizational Trauma after the Las Vegas Shooting
After-action reports are important texts that make sense of moments of crisis and restore organizational order. We add to existing research on these reports by incorporating the rhetorical concepts of terministic screens and the pentad to understand how reports commemorate disorder and organizational trauma. Analyzing the multiple reports created after the 2017 Las Vegas Shooting, we find that reports from different professional fields commemorat…
Topical Analysis of Nuclear Experts' Perceptions of Publics, Nuclear Energy, and Sustainable Futures
Nuclear energy experts consider commercial power from fission to be a strong contender to help mitigate the increasing effects of climate change, in part due to its low-to-no carbon emissions. Nevertheless, nuclear energy's history, including meltdowns such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, and dumping in sacred Indigenous land such as Yucca Mountain, raises important concerns in public deliberation over nuclear power. These communi…
Fostering climate change consensus: The role of intimacy in group discussions
This study examined if creating intimacy in a group discussion is more effective toward reaching consensus about climate change than a focus on information. Participants were randomly assigned to either a group that spent the first part of an online discussion engaging in self-disclosure and focusing on shared values (intimacy condition) or discussing information from an article about climate change (information condition). Afterward, all groups …
Sensory Engagement with the Rhetoric of Science: Creationist Copia at the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History
The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) opened the Discovery Center for Science and Earth History in Dallas, Texas in September 2019. Through immersive exhibits and advanced technology, the museum communicates what ICR purports to be the truth of creation science. Informed by the rhetorical concept of copia, I argue that the Discovery Center deploys sensory evidence to support creationism through the rhetorical strategies of rotation, immersion…
Sarah E. Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses
Sarah E. Fredericks, Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses (Oxford University Press, 2021), 240 pp., $85 (hbk), ISBN: 9780198842699
Building Coalitions from Shared Pieties: Polyvocal Religious Environmentalism at the Asian Rural Institute
The Asian Rural Institute (ARI) is a Christian organization based in Tochigi, Japan that emphasizes foodlife work (working to grow food to sustain life), servant leadership, and community development. In analyzing the experiences of ARI community members, we located three themes that encapsulate ARI’s negotiation of religious environmentalism: 1) hierarchy, 2) ritual, and 3) tensions. These themes create polyvocality, or multiple voices, which we…
Rhetorical fractals: An Afrocentric analysis of #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
Derek Chauvin’s trial for murdering George Floyd was a flashpoint of public deliberation around justice, accountability, and police reform. Burkean approaches to guilt, and their corresponding Western understandings of language, can be extended through Afrocentric rhetorics. We propose the “rhetorical fractal” to encompass Black ways of knowing and communicating. Unlike a cycle that returns to its starting point, a fractal is endlessly complex an…
Care and Constraints in the Climate Crisis: An Intersectional Rhetorical Analysis of News Comments about the El Dorado Fire
In September 2020, a gender reveal party started the El Dorado Fire in southern California. We analyzed comments on news coverage of the fire from two outlets with different political leanings to evaluate how the rhetorical process of assigning guilt is influenced by interlocking systems of power, making an intersectional lens useful for analyzing responses to environmental crises. Some comments evoked scapegoat ecology, which is a response to gu…
Of Markets, Masks, and (White) Men: Mimetic Performances of Parasitic Publicity During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This article argues that the anti-masking and anti-vaccination subreddit community known as r/NoNewNormal is an example of a parasitic public that circulates feelings of autonomy, victimization, and militancy to advance white masculinity in the public sphere. This bundle of affects thrives parasitically on the corrosiveness of deliberative democracy and neoliberal antagonisms (e.g., mask mandates and lockdowns). We call this virulent enactment of…
Dimensions of time and space in narratives for climate action
Addressing climate change requires engaging with the fluid, dynamic, and amorphous narrative of humanature relationships. I view environmental rhetoric as practices of storytelling that structure reality, guide actions, and shape understanding of the environment. Through rhetorical criticism, I analyzed fragments of climate activist discourse related to the narratives’ temporal and spatial scopes. I argue that reimagining the scope of our climate…
Engaged Scholarship in Times of Crisis
In 2021, the world was facing the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Doomsday Clock read ‘100 seconds to midnight’. In the United States, Donald Trump was ousted from the presidency, but not before he incited an attempted coup that cost several lives and entrenched political tensions. One year had passed since George Floyd’s murder ignited nationwide protests
Digital Climate Rhetoric and the Corrupted Scientist Archetype
Social media platforms are prominent arenas for the circulation of climate change discourse, both scientific and skeptical. Watts Up With That (WUWT) is a blog and Facebook community that is a central node in the climate skeptical network. We collected WUWT Facebook posts using BirdSong Analytics and used iterative coding informed by theories of credibility to categorize rhetorical strategies that WUWT members use to undermine the credibility of …
Using Narrative Webs to Facilitate Effective Science Communication
Given the intertwining of story and science, this article argues that science communication is always already an act of storytelling making it suitable for narrative analysis. However, among the extensive vocabulary from narrative theories across a variety of disciplines and practices, it can be overwhelming to synthesize this information into a manageable heuristic to apply to specific stories. To rectify this gap in intention and application, t…
Mothers as Science Storytellers
Explores how scientific meaning and decision-making are filtered through the stories we tell about science and through our social, cultural, and personal identities. Focusing on mothers as a prominent and important identity in science communication, this Element explores both the obstacles and the opportunities for public engagement with scientific topics. After providing an overview of the nexus of science communication, stories, and identities,…
Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Climate Emotions: Stories from Nevada
An interdisciplinary team surveyed 1560 Nevadans about their climate concerns. Using qualitative coding of open-ended responses, analysis revealed three aggregate themes in how Nevadans communicated their climate concerns: 1) variation in abstraction related to temporal and spatial proximity of concern, 2) shared concern that the window of opportunity is closing to take meaningful action, and 3) variation in emotional responses including and beyo…
Web Archives and Historicizing Rhetorics of Science, Technology, and Medicine: Reflecting on Some Pragmatic and Ethical Considerations
Political science (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Rhetorical question (13 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (12 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Rhetoric (9 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)