Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/35-2430

Title: Multispecies Discourse Analysis
Subtitle: The Nexus of Discourse and Practice in Sea Turtle Tourism and Conservation
Series Title: Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics
Publication Year: 2024

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/
Book URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/multispecies-discourse-analysis-9781350229617/

Author(s): Gavin Lamb

Reviewer: Yat Ho Wong

Summary

This book offers an engaging ethnographic account of sea turtle ecotourism in Hawai‘i, providing a critical lens on how conservation practices, multispecies relations, and neoliberal environmental imaginaries are discursively constructed and contested.

Chapter 1 lays the empirical and theoretical foundation for Lamb’s ethnography of sea turtle ecotourism in Hawai‘i, focusing on the discursive production and commodification of conservation. Lamb critiques how sea turtles are spectacularised and aestheticised in global conservation discourse—rendered charismatic, exotic, and emotionally resonant to mobilise public interest and private funding. These affective representations, exemplified by ubiquitous sea turtle imagery in Hawai‘i’s tourist infrastructure, embody what Lamb terms spectacular nature: a discourse that encourages a consumerist, distanced relationship with wildlife while reinforcing neoliberal logics of individual responsibility and market-based environmentalism. Drawing on Urry and Larsen’s (2011) concept of the environmental tourist gaze, Lamb argues that ecotourism frames nature as an object of visual and affective consumption, shaping not only tourist experience but broader ideologies of nature (2024: 46). Despite ecotourism’s sustainability claims, it often reproduces colonial and capitalist structures that commodify both land and species. Lamb thus situates his critique within larger debates on environmental governance, conservation branding, and the fetishisation of nature. Methodologically, Lamb proposes a socioculturally situated, interactionally grounded approach to conservation discourse, informed by critical discourse analysis. He examines a heterogeneous archive of legal documents, scientific reports, media texts, and ethnographic interviews, tracing how policy, science, and local practices intersect (2024: 32). Key tensions emerge in the management of turtle-human interactions, where legal enforcement logics (e.g. differentiating "lethal" from "nonlethal" threats) fail to fully address the affective, relational dimensions of multispecies coexistence (202: 41-42). Importantly, Lamb does not reject ecotourism in its entirety. Instead, he identifies the potential for alternative conservation practices to emerge from grassroots, community-led initiatives such as Mālama na Honu. These interventions operate within complex terrains marked by legal ambiguity, cultural plurality, and commodified ecologies (2024: 53). Rather than reinforcing the dominant spectacle-driven paradigm, such efforts foreground situated, relational modes of environmental care that challenge and reconfigure neoliberal and colonial conservation logics.

In Chapter 2, Lamb explores how a global discourse of “spectacular nature” circulates through ecotourism infrastructures and practices to shape how tourists interact with sea turtles in Hawai‘i. He argues that this discourse, rooted in neoliberal environmentalism and colonial imaginaries, positions wildlife as charismatic spectacles to be consumed through close-up, affectively charged encounters (2024: 44-45). Focusing on Laniakea Beach, Lamb analyses how this discourse is mobilised across three interconnected circuits of mediation. First, he examines the mediatisation of the beach through tourism media that configures tourists’ expectations by showcasing turtles as visually and emotionally captivating subjects. Second, he investigates embodied tourist performances, where visitors materialise these expectations through tactile interactions and gaze practices shaped by mediated narratives. Third, Lamb analyses the remediated circulation of these encounters on social media, where tourist-generated content perpetuates the discourse and encourages future visits, further entrenching the beach’s identity as a turtle tourism site. Throughout, Lamb emphasises the agentive role of sea turtles, who may disrupt or co-shape these practices, highlighting a dialogic process rather than a one-directional imposition of meaning. The chapter underscores how such spectacular discourses forge superficial and commodified affective ties between humans and animals, while obscuring deeper ethical or ecological engagements. Lamb’s approach, grounded in mediated discourse analysis, brings attention to the multimodal and material circuits that enable ecotourism discourse to travel, transform, and become embedded in specific tourism sites. Ultimately, he critiques how these processes sustain anthropocentric, commodifying relations with wildlife, raising concerns about the environmental and ethical consequences of neoliberal ecotourism.

Chapter 3 examines how conservation efforts at Laniakea Beach are discursively constructed through the competing interventions of wildlife management officials, local community activists, and volunteers. Lamb's central goal is to show that sea turtle conservation is not governed by a singular, monolithic discourse but is assembled through multiple, sometimes conflicting discourses shaped by different actors. The chapter focuses on how volunteers from Mālama na Honu enact and embody a discourse genre of "nature interpretation" and "outreach" to mediate human-turtle interactions and promote conservation in the context of mass tourism (2024: 90). Lamb analyses how this outreach discourse is technologised into communicative practices through training checklists, which function as metadiscursive tools to standardise volunteer behaviour. Volunteers are socialised into a communicative repertoire that emphasises respectful, diplomatic engagement. The chapter suggests that conservation is performative, situated, and negotiated. Conservation emerges not simply through knowledge transmission, but through the embodied and contested interactions of a discourse community engaged in site-based environmental governance.

Chapter 4 investigates how verbal and nonverbal stance-taking practices shape human–turtle encounters and reveal the differential emergence of nonhuman charisma. Lamb’s primary goal is to examine how volunteers and tourists use language and embodied resources to sense, know, and represent sea turtles, and how these representations—rooted in Lorimer’s (2007) concept of charisma—are enlisted in conservation and ecotourism assemblages. He argues that charisma functions as a “powerful organizational force” that brings together diverse epistemic and affective communities around shared ecocultural interests (2024: 121), yet the processes by which charisma is discursively constructed, negotiated, and contested remain understudied. To explore this, Lamb analyses in situ exchanges at Laniakea Beach, showing how evaluative stances (“Asians like to touch sea turtles because it’s lucky” vs. “Americans just think wild sea turtles are cool!”) position speakers and interlocutors in terms of cultural difference and reveal competing forms of nonhuman charisma (2024: 122). He frames these stances as windows into “ecocultural identity formation,” arguing that tourists’ and volunteers’ affective and epistemic attitudes toward turtles co-construct human and nonhuman identities in real time (2024: 122). For example, a disappointed tourist’s expression of finding “only” one or two turtles is traced back to prior encounters with commodified representations of “Turtle Beach,” demonstrating how mediated expectations shape affective experiences (2024: 138). Lamb foregrounds two primary stances—affective (emotion) and epistemic (knowledge)—showing how attributing thoughts and emotions to turtles (“he’s confused,” “she’s feisty”) serves as a commonplace practice that both anthropomorphises animals and indexes the speaker’s own identity (2024: 129-130). Volunteers and tourists thus form “stance-taking communities” around turtles, negotiating inclusion and exclusion through competing ecocultural discourses. These interactions illustrate how charisma operates as a “boundary object,” enabling collaboration among divergent groups while also generating conflict when multiple charismatic forms collide (2024: 149-152). Ultimately, Lamb positions stance taking as a vital analytic unit for understanding how sea turtles become charismatic, which mediate complex human–nonhuman relationships in Hawai‘i’s ecotourism and conservation contexts.

Chapter 5 investigates the discursive construction of multispecies communities, focusing on the contested meanings and politics surrounding Hawaiian green sea turtles at Laniakea Beach. Drawing on a wide range of multimodal data—including public testimony, Facebook discussions, and local meetings—Lamb analyses how social actors mobilise discourses of cultural heritage, ecological preservation, and public management to argue for divergent courses of action. For example, community members invoke Native Hawaiian ancestral knowledge to oppose technocratic "solutions" like The Quinlan Plan, which seeks to manage turtle traffic through quantification and infrastructural control (2024: 168). Others credentialise themselves as "locals" to claim legitimacy. These debates exemplify struggles over competing visions of the future grounded in different epistemologies and discursive resources. Beyond human actors, the chapter explores the theoretical and practical inclusion of sea turtles as political participants. Building on Meijer’s (2019) work on nonhuman political agency, Lamb proposes a broader conception of political communication that recognises nonverbal, embodied, and spatial forms of expression. He draws attention to underwater sites and behavioural cues (e.g. nesting patterns or habitat use) as loci of interspecies deliberation. The sea turtles’ communicative practices, while excluded from conventional democratic fora, may nevertheless participate in shaping multispecies futures—provided we rethink dominant assumptions about language and political legitimacy. Overall, the chapter offers a situated, multimodal analysis of how both humans and turtles co-construct community and conflict in the Anthropocene.

Evaluation

Lamb's goals of reimagining discourse analysis within a multispecies context are ambitiously pursued. He aims to "ecologise" discourse studies, promoting an ecologically engaged approach to language that transcends human-centric analyses. Lamb's exploration of sea turtle tourism and conservation discourse, notably through the lens of mediated discourse analysis, lays a foundation for reconceptualising human-nonhuman interaction as part of a broader multispecies contact zone. However, while Lamb makes significant strides, the ultimate success of his goals is nuanced, balancing notable advancements with limitations that invite further exploration.

One of Lamb’s central objectives is to push against anthropocentrism in discourse studies. In Chapter 1, Lamb examines how Laniakea Beach became both a sea turtle tourism destination and a site for conservation efforts, offering a valuable critique of neoliberal environmentalism and its impact on conservation practices. His analysis of how sea turtle tourism has been shaped by discourses of spectacle is insightful, revealing the complexities of human engagement with nonhuman beings. Lamb’s approach challenges the traditional human-centred focus of discourse analysis, presenting a multispecies perspective that is crucial for understanding the intersections between language, culture, and ecology.

Lamb also develops the concept of “nonhuman charisma,” which explores how human perceptions of sea turtles influence conservation discourse. In Chapter 4, he highlights the importance of nonhuman charisma in shaping human identities and intercultural relations at Laniakea. This focus on charisma, though illuminating, reveals Lamb’s own recognition of the book's primary limitation—its human-centred perspective. In his acknowledgment that a more complete account of nonhuman charisma would require attention to how sea turtles themselves might take stances, Lamb admits that his current work still prioritises human agency. This points to a gap in Lamb’s research, as he contemplates the future need for a more symmetrical understanding of nonhuman agency, which remains largely unexplored in this volume.

The use of Meijer’s (2019) model in Chapter 5 to consider how sea turtles could be political agents is a particularly notable attempt to incorporate nonhuman perspectives into discourse analysis. Here, Lamb not only critiques the anthropocentric nature of much discourse research but also offers a speculative framework for involving nonhuman actors in political discourse. This expansion of discourse analysis into the multispecies domain is a clear response to his goal of decentering human agency. However, Lamb himself recognises that this approach is in its early stages and requires further interdisciplinary collaboration to fully develop.

While Lamb makes considerable progress in aligning discourse analysis with posthumanist and ecological perspectives, the chapters are deeply grounded in human discursive acts, such as volunteer education and tourism practices, without fully incorporating nonhuman agency. This shortcoming is most evident in his discussion of nonhuman charisma, where he notes that sea turtles are not yet treated as active participants in discourse. Lamb’s future research promises to rectify this limitation, aiming for a richer, more holistic account of multispecies relations.

In conclusion, Lamb's work successfully opens a new frontier in discourse analysis by introducing an ecological, multispecies perspective. His use of mediated discourse analysis challenges traditional human-centred approaches. However, the human-centric lens that dominates much of his analysis highlights the need for further development, particularly in addressing the agency of nonhuman actors. While Lamb delivers valuable insights into the intersection of language, conservation, and human-nonhuman interactions, the work ultimately leaves room for a deeper engagement with the nonhuman world, which will likely be addressed in future research.

References

Lamb, G. (2024). Multispecies discourse analysis. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Lorimer, J. (2007). Nonhuman charisma. Environment and Planning. Discourse, Society &

Space, 25(5), 911–932.

Meijer, E. (2019). When animals speak: Toward an interspecies democracy. New York University

Press.

Urry, J., & Larsen, J. (2011). The tourist gaze 3.0 (3rd ed.). SAGE.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Yannis Wong is investigating the self- and other-construction of Hong Kong migrants in British public discourse. His research focuses on how elite discourse influences migrants' lived experiences, particularly how these Hong Kong migrants negotiate their identity in their new home, with whom they share a colonial relationship in the past. This project aims to uncover the underlying rationale and discursive strategies behind this unprecedented and exceptional change in the British immigration system, which has only become more stringent, using the Discourse-historical Approach.