Cultural Studies Adjunct: Phaedra Pezzullo
My research, teaching, and service primarily engage environmental justice studies, tourist studies, social movement studies, and environmental communication. My perspective is informed by an interdisciplinary training in the humanities and the sciences. I draw upon ethnographic participant observation fieldwork, qualitative interviews, my own activism, popular media, news archives, and interdisciplinary secondary research. My first book, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice, focuses on the North American environmental justice movement’s use of noncommercial advocacy tours, called “toxic tours,” to publicize persistent residential segregation, environmental racism, environmental classism, reproductive and gendered politics, public health concerns, local definitions of place, and the impacts of the ongoing toxification of our world. My first edited book, Environmental Justice and Environmentalism, is an interdisciplinary collection on the relationship between environmental and environmental justice movements. In May 2008, I edited a special double issue of the journal, Cultural Studies, on the environment. I serve on the
editorial boards of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Quarterly Journal of
Speech, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, and Environmental Communication: A
Journal of Nature and Culture. Currently, I am engaged in projects on: tourism and
disaster; nuclear pollution and everyday life; rhetoric and performance; and disaster
fatigue. I teach graduate courses on: feminism/gender studies; the body; the
environment; and transgression and resistance. For more information, see my website:
www.indiana.edu/~envtrhet