Publications

’A Primordial Situation’: Metonymical Linkages in US Newspaper Coverage of Wet Markets

Published in Environmental Communciation, 2022

COVID-19 has ushered in controversy and debate over Chinese wet markets, including calls for their immediate shutdown by major politicians and international figures. Despite their politicization, there is considerable confusion on what wet markets are and their relation to wildlife, sale of exotic animals and/or disease risk. This study examines US newspaper coverage of wet markets in the spring of 2020, finding that articles portrayed wet markets as metonyms for broader shifts in human–animal relations. In place of examining specific behaviors that threatened public health, coverage tended to emphasize the strangeness of meats and slaughter to a Western audience familiar with a broad gap between meat and animals, repeating tropes of Chinese dog or cat-eating. As a result, discomfort at wet market descriptions is easily translated into racial animus, associating inappropriate human–animal contact with cultural pathology and marking factory farming as a litmus test of a developed distance from nature.

Recommended citation: Rooney, David. (2022). "’A Primordial Situation’: Metonymical Linkages in US Newspaper Coverage of Wet Markets." Environmental Communication. 16(6). http://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17524032.2022.2125548

’All Fishing is Wildlife Poaching:’ Nonhuman Animal Imagery and Mutual Avowal in Racing Extinction and Seaspiracy

Published in Journalism and Media, 2022

Images of nonhuman animals may be effective tools in producing climate concern and empathy for animals, particularly if animals are shown in natural habitats. Visual and narrative analysis of the documentary Racing Extinction identifies a practice of selectively recognizing the individuality of certain animals. Despite emphasizing the intrinsic worth of often-marginalized animals, Racing Extinction reproduces the marginalization of domesticated animals raised for consumption and less charismatic marine life. A close reading of the film’s animal imagery also reveals a spatialized bias—visualizing violence against marine life overwhelmingly in China and Indonesia and by comparison associating the U.S. with indirect climate harm rather than the direct killing of animals. Intertwining a decolonial ethic with a critical animal studies perspective, this paper reveals how disjointed imagery of nonhuman animal suffering facilitates racial scapegoating, masks the exploitation of marine life by the U.S. and partitions uneven ethical responsibilities towards nonhuman animals. This is contrasted to the documentary Seaspiracy, which advances a universal, non-speciesist ethic of “mutual avowal”, contextualizing images of violence against marine life in a global frame.

Recommended citation: Rooney, David. (2022). "’All Fishing is Wildlife Poaching:’ Nonhuman Animal Imagery and Mutual Avowal in Racing Extinction and Seaspiracy." Journalism and Media . 3(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/journalmedia3020020