Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2024

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Major

English

Major Professor

Sean W. Morey

Committee Members

Jessica A. Greiser, Lisa M. King

Abstract

Zoos are unique locations that often bring the natural world into urban settings for the purposes of conducting research, engaging in conservation initiatives, and educating and entertaining the public (Miranda et al., 2023, p. 290). However, the version of nature that zoos construct can be imperfect in that zoos may obscure the reality of their environments and create discrepancies in their treatment of different species. Engaging with environmental communication scholarship that explores how humans consider the voices of nonhuman animals and align animal representations with human interests, I use an ecolinguistic framework to inquire into how nonhuman animals are treated linguistically at Zoo Knoxville in comparison to one another. This comparison is completed in reference to different categories that each animal belongs to: native, exotic, and pest. I also seek to identify the differences between Zoo Knoxville’s communication on humans and the zoo’s communication on the nonhuman animals in the aforementioned categories as a whole. In order to accomplish this, I analyze zoo documentation, plaques, and signage using the concepts of ideology, framing, salience, and erasure. In doing so, I find that Zoo Knoxville indeed listens to the voices of nonhumans. However, this listening is tempered by the material-symbolic representations that align with zoos’ desire to educate and entertain the public and to carry out conservation initiatives and research in a monitored setting. These representations obscure the material reality of the zoo’s environment. Zoo Knoxville, as a result, could invest in bringing this obscured reality to the fore.

Download
Files over 3MB may be slow to open. For best results, right-click and select "save as..."

Share

COinS