36.2156, Reviews: Multispecies Discourse Analysis: Gavin Lamb (2024)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2156. Mon Jul 14 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2156, Reviews: Multispecies Discourse Analysis: Gavin Lamb (2024)

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Date: 14-Jul-2025
From: Yat Ho Wong [yannisyhwong at gmail.com]
Subject: Anthropological Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, General Linguistics, Sociolinguistics: Gavin Lamb (2024)


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.



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