Phaedra C. Pezzullo – författare

The environment is perhaps most misunderstood as a static place, somewhere "out there," separated from the practices of our everyday lives. Given this assumption, environmental movements and concerns have remained mostly marginalized or denigrated in cultural studies publications, conferences, and presentations. Recent global developments have made changing this oversight and, at times, direct resistance to engaging environmental concerns a new priority. This edited collection illustrates an appreciation of the dynamic, palpable, and significant ways the environment permeates culture (and vice versa), as well as a collective commitment to the ways that cultural studies has more to offer—and to learn from—taking environmental matters to heart. Like foundational categories of identity, economics, and historical context, this collection reminds us why the environment is and should be considered relevant to any work done in the name of "cultural studies." Including research from four continents and across media, the authors offer insights on timely topics such as food, tourism, human/animal relations, forests, queer theory, indigenous rights, and water. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.

Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, Phaedra C. Pezzullo engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. She argues that plastics have become an articulator of crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of carbon-heavy masculinity, carceral policies, planetary fatalism, eco-ableism, greenwashing, marine life endangerment, pollution colonialism, and waste imperialism. Attuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.

Tourism is at once both a beloved pastime and a denigrated form of popular culture. Romanticized for its promise of pleasure, tourism is also potentially toxic, enabling the deadly exploitation of the cultures and environments visited. For many decades, the environmental justice movement has offered —toxic tours,— non-commercial trips intended to highlight people and locales polluted by poisonous chemicals. Out of these efforts and their popular reception, a new understanding of democratic participation in environmental decision-making has begun to arise. Phaedra C. Pezzullo examines these tours as a tactic of resistance and for their potential in reducing the cultural and physical distance between hosts and visitors.Pezzullo begins by establishing the ambiguous roles tourism and the toxic have played in the U.S. cultural imagination since the mid-20th century in a range of spheres, including Hollywood films, women's magazines, comic books, and scholarly writings. Next, drawing on participant observation, interviews, documentaries, and secondary accounts in popular media, she identifies and examines a range of tourist performances enabled by toxic tours. Extended illustrations of the racial, class, and gender politics involved include Louisiana’s —Cancer Alley,— California’s San Francisco Bay Area, and the Mexican border town of Matamoros. Weaving together social critiques of tourism and community responses to toxic chemicals, this critical, rhetorical, and cultural analysis brings into focus the tragedy of ongoing patterns of toxification and our assumptions about travel, democracy, and pollution.

The best-selling Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere offers your students a comprehensive introduction to the field of environmental communication. The updated Seventh Edition explores recent events and research, including the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on journalism, climate commitments of Big Tech, ultra-processed food policy, anti-plastics advocacy, expanding legal rights of nonhuman animals, and more.