I am Seth Tuler, a PhD candidate at Clark University, Worcester, MA. I was
in the Environment, Technology, and Society Program, but the name was
recently changed to the Environmental Science and Policy Program.
I am finishing my dissertation, which is a study of how interlocutor
evaluative orientations toward others and issues are related to the
"generativity" of dialogic interactions in environmental policy settings. I
am particularly interested in face to face interactions that occur in certain
kinds of collaborative/cooperative public involvement settings, rather than
adversarial settings such as public hearings, litigation, etc. While my
interest is focused on environmental policy (and even more narrowly land-use
issues--forests, watersheds, coastal zones) the theoretical issues are more
general I think.
The theory that I use in my dissertation is grounded in Bakhtin, borrows from
Lotman (dual function of texts), research on persuasion and argumentation
(inspite of its being so cognitive, some is helpful and some has recently
taken a more 'argumentative turn"). Jim Wertsch is on my committee (the
other people are Ortwin Renn, a social psychologist, and Roger Kasperson, a
geographer).
One offshoot of this research is also an attempt to think about the types of
discourses (as speech forms) that are used by people with different kinds of
interests and authority in different kinds of interactional settings, and
what types of factors seem to be important to individuals' choice of
particular explanatory/argumentative/rhetorical strategies (as characterized
by discourse forms).
A second offshoot is some research on how one can go about evaluating
democratic policy dialogue (democratic in a constructive, transformative,
community-supportive/empowering sense that deals with power relations,
ecological relations, etc.. I remember from last year on this list some
discussion of how the voices of those without access gain (or are excluded)
from certain discussions--I think about a twist on this, which is how "stuff"
that cannot have voice as we conceive of it usually (slugs, pangolins, balsam
firs, rivers) are "given" voice by people (different people in the same
place/time or the same people in different places/times).
Seth Tuler
(ES&P Program, Clark University)
POB 20
E. Otis, MA 01029-0020