Gwendolyn
Inocencio

Developing theoretical frameworks that account for the rhetorical capacities of nonhuman actors — plants, animals, ecosystems — within shared communicative environments.

Consider the beaver. When beavers engineer wetlands, they actively "read" their environment, interpreting topographic signs and teaching their young to understand the landscape across generations. However, modern economic policies typically reduce this complex communication to a mere "ecosystem service" like flood control. My research explores how human systems can be redesigned to respect, rather than reduce, this nonhuman agency.

Applying semiotic theory to ecological contexts to examine how meaning is produced, circulated, and interpreted across species boundaries and within more-than-human assemblages.

Consider a burning forest or a polluted lake. When vast tracts of a forest burn and send thick, orange smoke hundreds of miles into urban areas, humans typically treat the haze as a mere weather inconvenience or a static data point. Ecosemiotics, however, asks us to read that smoke as a direct form of cross-species communication—as the forest actively "speaking" and signaling its ecological distress to human communities.

Situating rhetorical inquiry within the broader interdisciplinary project of environmental communication, attending to questions of ethics, justice, and cohabitation.

Consider a river fighting for its rights in court. When modern institutions govern a river, they typically communicate about it purely in economic terms, debating how much water can be extracted for agriculture or calculating the maximum amount of pollution it can absorb before the ecosystem collapses. This institutional perspective creates a one-sided, monological conversation that treats a living environment as a mute, manageable resource rather than a co-inhabitant.

Reading literary and cultural texts for their representations of the natural world, and examining how such representations shape environmental attitudes and practices.

Consider how global institutions write about migrating animals. When international economic reports describe the natural world, they often refer to mobile elements of nature—like migrating birds, fish, or flowing water—as "fugitive resources." Ecocriticism asks us to pause and look closely at that specific word choice. By using the word "fugitive," a term generally reserved for criminals fleeing the law, the text subtly frames nature's natural movement as a rebellious act evading human ownership and economic containment.

Exploring the distributed, networked nature of rhetorical situations — attending to the material, spatial, and temporal dimensions of communicative environments.

Consider the 100,000-year journey of an Antarctic mountain. When we think of communication, we usually picture an immediate exchange between humans in a single room. But rhetorical ecologies ask us to look at how meaning and influence travel across vast distances of space and time. For instance, as Antarctic mountains naturally weather, they release iron sediment that travels through glaciers and ocean currents for up to 100,000 years. When this iron finally reaches the sunlit open ocean, it triggers massive phytoplankton blooms that pull carbon from the atmosphere, regulate the global climate, and feed whales that pump nutrients back to the surface. The mountain, the glacier, the ocean, and the whales are all participating in a distributed, material communication network that sustains planetary life.

Theorizing modes of ethical cohabitation and reciprocal communication that honor the agencies and expressions of all participants in shared ecological communities.

Consider a business that treats a forest as a partner rather than a product. When standard economic frameworks approach the natural world, they typically operate through an "epistemology of utility," reducing complex living beings into static capital assets to be mechanically optimized for maximum human yield. This extractive logic forces the environment to conform to a spreadsheet, silencing the shared ecological community in the name of profit and widening the "abyss of non-comprehension" between humans and nature.

The active, power-laden institutional labor required to generate, circulate, and sustain particular ways of knowing, often by transforming complex ecological relationships into standardized, governable metrics. This fundamentally contrasts with passive legibility, which is simply the act of reading a naturalized code—like instantly understanding a "STOP" sign without questioning the vast legal and spatial infrastructure that makes it recognizable and enforceable.

Consider a living forest entering a global carbon market. When programs like the United Nation's REDD+ evaluate a forest, they do not just passively observe it; they actively render the complex ecosystem into a discrete "carbon sink" so its diverse life processes are compelled to "imitate" exchangeable carbon credits. To keep this newly created asset readable to financial markets, institutions must deploy a massive, ongoing maintenance apparatus consisting of remote sensing technology, ground-based forest inventories, third-party auditing, and standardized reporting protocols. This active institutional labor successfully translates the forest's vibrant biological reality into quantifiable economic units, while rendering its actual, multi-scalar ecological communication completely illegible to the market system.