Kevin Michael Deluca
Biographic Data
| ID | 896735 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin Michael Deluca |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Deluca |
| SIGNATURE | DELUCA K M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Utah |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8356-5511 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 80 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Digital/Social Media as Environment
Environmentalism has a paradoxical relationship with technology, one rarely acknowledged but always present: environmentalism was born of and opposed to industrialism. That is, environmentalism was
Mobilizing the Public in Saving the Bonneville Salt Flats
This study seeks to explicate blame as a psychological construct. Situated in the environmental problem of the decline of the Bonneville Salt Flats (BSF), the study examines the structure of blame and how it may mediate message effect on the public’s issue engagement to save the BSF. With data collected from a Web-based experiment on a college student sample, blame was shown to be best modeled as a latent construct consisting of both the cognitiv…
Extinction Rebellion, Image events, social media and the eclipse of the earth
Image events amidst eco-ruins
An idea, a concept, a book: all have lives of their own over which a writer has no control. For 20 years now, I have been surprised by the journey of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environment
The conditions that form us
Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with this question. Together, the authors contend that any attempt to understand social change must attend to the conditions of possibility for transformations of any kind, as well as the forces that condition us to feel, think, and act (differently). In these opening pages, we trace this underlying thread through to its…
Exploring Environmentalism amidst the Clamor of Networks
Dwelling in a world awash in multiple environmental crises while science and social theory erode the last vestiges of the subject of humanism, it makes sense to imagine our world beyond the lens of humanism and turn to diverse methodologies in order to explore what is going on and how to promote changes that nurture ecological sustainability. In this essay we take on this task in relation to environmental communication. In what follows we explore…
Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (Ows) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, Ows was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, Ows's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much d…
Image Politics
This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics …
Salvaging Wilderness from the Tomb of History
In the age of industrialism, wilderness is the counterbalance to human excesses and the inspiration for environmental activists. Today, wilderness is even more important and contested as people face multiple environmental crises on a planet with an exploding human population and voracious consumer appetite. Too often obscured by the technosphere that engulfs us, wilderness awaits its ecoteur filmmakers to give it greater presence on the public sc…
Playing in the Mud
Greenpeace International Media Analyst Reflects on Communicating Climate Change
Kevin Michael DeLuca*Kevin Michael DeLuca is a professor at the University of Utah. He is author of numerous articles, including “Meeting in a Redwood: Wilderness on the Public Screen” and “Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Experimental Theory and Practice.”
Memories of the Tropics in Industrial Jungles
This essay examines zoos as a site of struggle in the construction of meanings and memories of human–nature relations. Modern zoos are symbols of imperial power and celebrations of the domination of nature. The grafting of “tropic worlds” onto these monuments of modernity renders the meaning of zoos more ambiguous, reflecting discursive struggles over the meaning of nature, questions about the wisdom of development and progress, recognition of th…
The Truth of the Matter
Armed with their personal experiences and community ties, the women of Environmental Justice have called into question the distribution of waste in the United States. In this essay, we explore the communicative practices that have enabled the movement to achieve change in extraordinarily difficult contexts. The women use what appears to be a liability, their gender, especially their role as mothers, to challenge practices and policies that threat…
Thinking With Heidegger
Behold the Corpse
The widely disseminated image of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse rhetorically transformed the lynched black body from a symbol of unmitigated white power to one illustrating the ugliness of racial violence and the aggregate power of the black community. This reconfiguration was, in part, an effect of the black community's embracing and foregrounding Till's abject body as a collective "souvenir" rather than allowing it to be safely exiled from publ…
Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice
The Mechanical Handmaiden Rhetoric After Marshall McLuhan
Despite a recent revival, Marshall McLuhan remains stranded on the theoretical margins of communication scholarship. Whether primarily because of his aphoristic and ambiguous writing or because of the immense difficulties posed by his thought for the study of communication, his peripheral status sidesteps around the important contributions he has made to understanding human discourse and interaction. In an effort to confront and reclaim McLuhan f…
From public sphere to public screen
The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen” as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's poli…
Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race
Rethinking Critical Theory
The Possibilities of Nature in a Postmodern Age
Mourners trudge up the steps to the imposing Kentucky state capitol. The men, in particular, are dressed in the uniforms of ordinary folk—cowboy hats and overalls or baseball caps, jeans, and polyester shirts. Six pallbearers carry a wooden coffin draped with a Kentucky state flag. To the haunting strains of “Wayfaring Stranger,” they lay the coffin down in the rotunda. A woman in black delivers a eulogy, decrying that “The burial of Kentucky in …
Behold the Corpse
The widely disseminated image of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse rhetorically transformed the lynched black body from a symbol of unmitigated white power to one illustrating the ugliness of racial violence and the aggregate power of the black community. This reconfiguration was, in part, an effect of the black community's embracing and foregrounding Till's abject body as a collective "souvenir" rather than allowing it to be safely exiled from publ…
Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race
The Truth of the Matter
Armed with their personal experiences and community ties, the women of Environmental Justice have called into question the distribution of waste in the United States. In this essay, we explore the communicative practices that have enabled the movement to achieve change in extraordinarily difficult contexts. The women use what appears to be a liability, their gender, especially their role as mothers, to challenge practices and policies that threat…
The Possibilities of Nature in a Postmodern Age
Mourners trudge up the steps to the imposing Kentucky state capitol. The men, in particular, are dressed in the uniforms of ordinary folk—cowboy hats and overalls or baseball caps, jeans, and polyester shirts. Six pallbearers carry a wooden coffin draped with a Kentucky state flag. To the haunting strains of “Wayfaring Stranger,” they lay the coffin down in the rotunda. A woman in black delivers a eulogy, decrying that “The burial of Kentucky in …
Image events amidst eco-ruins
An idea, a concept, a book: all have lives of their own over which a writer has no control. For 20 years now, I have been surprised by the journey of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environment
The conditions that form us
Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with this question. Together, the authors contend that any attempt to understand social change must attend to the conditions of possibility for transformations of any kind, as well as the forces that condition us to feel, think, and act (differently). In these opening pages, we trace this underlying thread through to its…
Playing in the Mud
The Possibilities of Nature in a Postmodern Age
Mourners trudge up the steps to the imposing Kentucky state capitol. The men, in particular, are dressed in the uniforms of ordinary folk—cowboy hats and overalls or baseball caps, jeans, and polyester shirts. Six pallbearers carry a wooden coffin draped with a Kentucky state flag. To the haunting strains of “Wayfaring Stranger,” they lay the coffin down in the rotunda. A woman in black delivers a eulogy, decrying that “The burial of Kentucky in …
Imagining Nature and Erasing Class and Race
Rethinking Critical Theory
From public sphere to public screen
The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen” as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's poli…
Image Events, the Public Sphere, and Argumentative Practice
The Mechanical Handmaiden Rhetoric After Marshall McLuhan
Despite a recent revival, Marshall McLuhan remains stranded on the theoretical margins of communication scholarship. Whether primarily because of his aphoristic and ambiguous writing or because of the immense difficulties posed by his thought for the study of communication, his peripheral status sidesteps around the important contributions he has made to understanding human discourse and interaction. In an effort to confront and reclaim McLuhan f…
Thinking With Heidegger
Behold the Corpse
The widely disseminated image of Emmett Till's mutilated corpse rhetorically transformed the lynched black body from a symbol of unmitigated white power to one illustrating the ugliness of racial violence and the aggregate power of the black community. This reconfiguration was, in part, an effect of the black community's embracing and foregrounding Till's abject body as a collective "souvenir" rather than allowing it to be safely exiled from publ…
The Truth of the Matter
Armed with their personal experiences and community ties, the women of Environmental Justice have called into question the distribution of waste in the United States. In this essay, we explore the communicative practices that have enabled the movement to achieve change in extraordinarily difficult contexts. The women use what appears to be a liability, their gender, especially their role as mothers, to challenge practices and policies that threat…
Greenpeace International Media Analyst Reflects on Communicating Climate Change
Kevin Michael DeLuca*Kevin Michael DeLuca is a professor at the University of Utah. He is author of numerous articles, including “Meeting in a Redwood: Wilderness on the Public Screen” and “Thinking with Heidegger: Rethinking Experimental Theory and Practice.”
Memories of the Tropics in Industrial Jungles
This essay examines zoos as a site of struggle in the construction of meanings and memories of human–nature relations. Modern zoos are symbols of imperial power and celebrations of the domination of nature. The grafting of “tropic worlds” onto these monuments of modernity renders the meaning of zoos more ambiguous, reflecting discursive struggles over the meaning of nature, questions about the wisdom of development and progress, recognition of th…
Salvaging Wilderness from the Tomb of History
In the age of industrialism, wilderness is the counterbalance to human excesses and the inspiration for environmental activists. Today, wilderness is even more important and contested as people face multiple environmental crises on a planet with an exploding human population and voracious consumer appetite. Too often obscured by the technosphere that engulfs us, wilderness awaits its ecoteur filmmakers to give it greater presence on the public sc…
Playing in the Mud
Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement
Amid a dizzying array of social media, the ground of activism has fractured into decentered knots creating a cacophony of panmediated worlds. Our analysis of Occupy Wall Street (Ows) offers a preliminary charting of the fragmenting of the old media world into a proliferation of social media worlds. On old media, Ows was stillborn, first neglected, and then frivolously framed. On social media, Ows's emergence was vibrant, its manifestations much d…
Image Politics
This exceptional volume examines “image events” as a rhetorical tactic utilized by environmental activists. Author Kevin Michael DeLuca analyzes widely televised environmentalist actions in depth to illustrate how the image event fulfills fundamental rhetorical functions in constructing and transforming identities, discourses, communities, cultures, and world views. Image Politics also exhibits how such events create opportunities for a politics …
Exploring Environmentalism amidst the Clamor of Networks
Dwelling in a world awash in multiple environmental crises while science and social theory erode the last vestiges of the subject of humanism, it makes sense to imagine our world beyond the lens of humanism and turn to diverse methodologies in order to explore what is going on and how to promote changes that nurture ecological sustainability. In this essay we take on this task in relation to environmental communication. In what follows we explore…
Image events amidst eco-ruins
An idea, a concept, a book: all have lives of their own over which a writer has no control. For 20 years now, I have been surprised by the journey of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environment
The conditions that form us
Under what conditions is social change possible today? The essays comprising this special issue grapple, each in their own way, with this question. Together, the authors contend that any attempt to understand social change must attend to the conditions of possibility for transformations of any kind, as well as the forces that condition us to feel, think, and act (differently). In these opening pages, we trace this underlying thread through to its…
Mobilizing the Public in Saving the Bonneville Salt Flats
This study seeks to explicate blame as a psychological construct. Situated in the environmental problem of the decline of the Bonneville Salt Flats (BSF), the study examines the structure of blame and how it may mediate message effect on the public’s issue engagement to save the BSF. With data collected from a Web-based experiment on a college student sample, blame was shown to be best modeled as a latent construct consisting of both the cognitiv…
Extinction Rebellion, Image events, social media and the eclipse of the earth
Digital/Social Media as Environment
Environmentalism has a paradoxical relationship with technology, one rarely acknowledged but always present: environmentalism was born of and opposed to industrialism. That is, environmentalism was
Sociology (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (8 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)