Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: discourse

“You keep using that word…” – a new paper

December 30, 2021 /
The 'killer viz' for Soubry and Sherren (2022), showing contrasting discourses around resilience between Maritime farmers and the feds.

The ‘killer viz’ for Soubry and Sherren (2022), showing contrasting discourses around resilience between Maritime farmers and the feds.

The third and final paper from Bernard Soubry’s PhD thesis is finally out in Land Use Policy, “You keep using that word…”: Disjointed definitions of resilience in food systems adaptation. Usually, when people use quotes at the start of a paper title, it comes from something one of the participants said. This time, it comes from The Princess Bride, a favourite movie in our house (in which the word in question is “inconceivable”). The term resilience is one of those panchrestons that can be difficult to grapple with, but Bernard did a great job of deconstructing its use in his interviews with Maritime farmers, and contrasting that with expressions of resilience in the same House and Senate reviews of agriculture and climate change that former postdoc Wes Tourangeau used in his last paper with me. Such secondary data sources provide a rare insight into the world of policy. This is also a great example of a qualitative ‘killer viz’ that draws on rich inductive coding without quantification.

Third report from grazing project

May 8, 2017 /
The cover of the third RHoMPAS report, led by Carlisle Kent.

The cover of the third RHoMPAS report, also led by Carlisle Kent.

Carlisle and I are happy to finally release her third report for my sustainable grazing project, which is based on research she undertook in winter 2016, The View from the Farm Sector: Discourse in Producer Organizations around Climate, Science and Agricultural Policy, 2010-2015. We were interested in looking for the farmer’s voice in Canadian discourses around grazing and climate change. We decided in the end to do so via producer organizations who give voice to widely distributed individual producers. This report describes the discourse by farming organizations around climate, and resulting hardships, as they are expressed to a range of audiences, across different scales (Canada and Alberta) and commodity groups. We collected almost a hundred documents that represented the climate-related public and policy engagement of Canadian and Albertan livestock producer organizations from 2010 to 2015. We did not seek to track any trajectory over that time, because of small and/or uneven numbers of documents in any given year, but rather use those documents to take a snapshot of discourse. Interesting patterns arose around which organization types are talking about climate versus weather, and to whom, and what sorts of interventions they thought might help the farming sector.

Summer Graduate RA position open

March 13, 2017 /

To staff up my sustainable grazing / climate change SSHRC project, I’m looking to hire a local graduate student as a summer research assistant. The specs are quite broad, including the possibility of doing research on bibliometrics, discourse analysis, policy, or farmer extension/education. The project will be designed to suit the candidate, but there must be interest in independent research. It could be ongoing, and fit as a project/internship/practicum/thesis in a range of programs, or be a contract if the candidate is graduating. Read the details  here, and apply by email to me if interested by April 1.

Discourse in HM and permaculture

December 9, 2015 /

All day today and tomorrow I will be enjoying final-term MREM student project presentations, including by HM project RA Carlisle Kent. After a summer spent on bibliometric analysis of holistic management, which we’re currently preparing for publication, she tackled a discourse analysis over the fall term. Specifically, we have been interested in the differences between the adaptive nature of the principles of holistic management (HM) and permaculture, and the sometimes proselytizing, ‘chapter and verse’ nature of proponent language. We wondered if this was in part responsible for the divide between practitioner and scientist perspectives of the practices. She looked at the rhetoric evident in  websites and Twitter, and mapped those two social movements online.  It was clear that rhetorical tools such as emotion, and building common ground through antipathy with non-members, were more evident than evidence. Additionally the adaptive and problem-solving nature of the movements were not at all evident in the discourse. Credibility suffers as a result. Great work and excellent presentation, Carlisle!

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