Date of Award

Spring 5-10-2025

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Communication

First Committee Advisor

Bridie McGreavy

Second Committee Member

Heather Leslie

Third Committee Member

Laura Rickard

Additional Committee Members

Nathan Stormer

Andrew Rominger

Abstract

Transdisciplinarity brings together different forms of expertise, perspectives, and orientations to create societally relevant knowledge. While co-producing such knowledge, collaborators create, encounter, struggle with, and negotiate difference. How difference bears on transdisciplinary projects matters because it influences how participants collaborate with each other and the material environment. This dissertation engages with communication studies and rhetorical concepts of articulation, embodiment, materiality, and difference. It uses a rhetorical ecological orientation that pays attention to articulations, or research practices, including knowledge mapping; writing a letter; fieldwork; applying Biocultural (BC) Notices; making a survey; collaborative digital media-making with an underwater drone; and focus group sessions. The articulations come together to form relational spaces from which other communication practices such as active listening, sharing, inclusive leadership, and care can emerge. How a collaboration engages with difference reflects a broad spectrum of its capacities to navigate and/or negotiate difference. Attending to difference matters because the ways in which a collaboration engages with difference provides clues to the quality of its collaboration and communication practices.

This engaged research considers how everyday research practices bring together bodies and materiality to create, negotiate, and maintain difference in communication and collaboration within the context of a science-based transdisciplinary collaborative project focused on environmental DNA, namely the Maine-eDNA Project. This dissertation draws from five years of engaged communication research (2020-2024) and analysis. Major insights suggest communication practices opened critical learning spaces for difference to emerge. Other communication practices (including sharing, inclusive leadership, laughter, storytelling, reflexivity, ethical data-sharing) constituted capacities for making, connecting across, and addressing difference in transdisciplinary collaboration. Additionally, within these practices, Biocultural Notices become complex entities that trouble, intervene, and invite change in Western, colonial practices of doing science by calling for Indigenous recognition, inclusion, and respect. Further, engagement with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) constitutes a lively collaborative space opening possibilities for building interdisciplinary capacities for shared learning and connecting across disciplinary boundaries. Our entanglements with this technology highlight the contingencies of practicing care with the material environment, with humans, and with the ROV. Finally, the analysis describes different perceptions about our (dis)connections with the underwater environment, its organisms, and technology.

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