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About Me

My name is David Rooney. Dáithí is what many people refer to me as (pronounced Daa-Hee). It is an Irish name, as I was born and raised outside Dublin. David is totally fine to refer to me as well.

I am currently a doctoral candidate at the Moody School of Communication, University of Texas-Austin. I am on the Rhetoric, Langauge and Political Communication track there under Dr. Johanna Hartelius, where I will defend my dissertation in Spring 2025.

Current Research

I am generally interested in the intersections of environmental communication, animal studies, and critical/cultural studies. In particular, some of my recent research examines how social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality and more are reproduced through Western norms of appropriate human-animal and, by extension, human-nature relations.

My dissertation looks at intersections and tensions between new materialist rhetorics of the AI/object and animal rhetorics, trying to outline how discourses of animality constitute human and non-human entities along the lines of religion, race, gender, ability and more. I look at Trump’s medalling of Conan the dog (who assisted in the raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, former leader of ISIL), Elon Musk’s plans for his neural technology Neuralink to enmesh humans with AI by moving past symbolic communication into neural-neural connections (what he calls “animal communication), and the first pig-to-human heart transplant from a genetically modified, un-named pig, which occurred in 2022.

Some recently published works examine:

1) Synecdoche in online discourse about Cracker Barrel’s introduction of the Impossible Sausage, a plant-based menu option. We outline a framework of rhetorical gastronativism to analyze the way food takes on rhetorical meaning– in this case, as a “woke” invader. We also suggest, building on previous works connecting meat consumption to ideas about hegemonic masculinity, that the Impossible Sausage stands in for trans contagion for irate Cracker Barrel fans– a fear that one’s gender will melt into fluidity after accidentally eating an Impossible Sausage. in Rhetoric & Public Affairs w/S.M. Muller (Asst Prof, Tx State)

2) The discursive construction of disease-risk (SARS-CoV-2) in US newspaper coverage of Chinese wet markets. I found that consumption of certain culturally favored animals (e.g., cats, dogs, horses), open-air slaughter and the live sale of animals were taken as evidence of cultural backwardness and propensity for disease, which ignored established high-risk practices, like the pangolin trade, as well as displaced the zoonotic disease risk of industrialized factory farming. in Environmental Communication

3) How ecological documentaries risk hierarchalizing environmental damage and producing bias by associating direct harms to individual species across Asia (particularly China and Indonesia) but associated only generalized ecological harm, without showing harm to individuals, with the West. I outline a series of best practices for environmental imagery for threatened species at the end. in Journalism & Media special issue edited by Carrie P. Freeman and Núria Almiron.

4) The growing importance of carnivore diets (particularly raw meat, raw eggs, raw milk, etc.) in both mainstream and far-right digital spaces. We outline what we call “primal rhetorical networks,” associated with the Carnivore turn popularized by Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, The Liver King and more. We argue that there is a rhetorical pipeline from mainstream carnivore influencers (like the Liver King) towards explicitly white nationalist carnivore thinkers, like the Raw Egg Nationalist. in Frontiers in Communication w/S.M. Muller (Asst Prof, Texas State) & Cecilia Cerja (Asst Prof, Sewanee: The University of the South).

Several on-going projects concern: ecological rhetorics of the machine, tensions and interconnections between environmental movements and animal rights movements, discourses of meat and plant-based foods, as well as legal rhetoric concerning environmental and other non-human rights.

Other Projects

I also engage in quantitative, public-engaged work on the areas of sustainable food and environmental justice. As avoiding 2°C of warming will be impossible without abandoning meat and dairy products, this is a major area of concern that is still underexplored.

One of my collaborative projects with Mercy for Animals, regarding plant-based purchasing requirements, was passed into law in LA County on Feburary 27th, 2024! The law requires that LA County: 1) prioritize plant-based foods in food-purchasing (annual budget ~$21m) 2) track GHG emissions from their food purchasing.

Press release here. Text of legislation here. My report here

Please see the options on the panel above for other recent works of mine in this area.