- Associate Professor of Environment & Society, UNSW
Tema Milstein's work tends to ways culture, society, and discourse inform – and are informed by – environmental relations. Her focus is on the cultural meaning systems that shape our ecological understandings, identities, and actions, and on ways we create a destructive status quo or regenerative ways of being. Her research interests include ecocultural identity, environmental communication, ecotourism and endangered wildlife, environmental activism, and ecoculture jamming. Her recently published Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020) (with co-editor José Castro-Sotomayor) gathers 40 international authors from across disciplines to bring the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of the self. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and recipient of a number of research grants. She is dedicated to transformative ecopedagogy, and is co-editor of Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice (Routledge, 2017) and served as her former institution's University Presidential Teaching Fellow. Milstein has taught at universities in Australia, the United States, Italy, China, and New Zealand. Before coming to UNSW, she was an associate professor of Geography & Environmental Studies and Environmental Communication at the University of New Mexico. In her previous professional life, she was a newspaper and public radio journalist.
Experience
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–presentAssociate Professor of Environment & Society, UNSW
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2007–2018Associate professor, University of New Mexico
Education
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2007University of Washington, PhD / Environment, Culture, & Communication
Publications
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2020Milstein, T., McGaurr, L. & Lester, L. Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620901443 , Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
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2020Milstein, T., & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351068840,
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2019Alhinai, M., & Milstein, T. From kin to commodity: Ecocultural relations in transition in Oman. 24 (12), 1078-1096. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2019.1672635, Local Environment
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2019Milstein, T., Thomas, M., & Hoffmann, J. Dams and flows: Immersing in Western meaning systems in search of ecocultural reflexivity. 13 (1), 104-117. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2018.1423626, Environmental Communication
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2018Carr, J., & Milstein, T. Keep burning coal or the manatee gets it: Rendering the carbon economy invisible through endangered species protection. 50 (1), 82-100. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12355, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography
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2017Debelo, A.R., Legesse, A., Milstein, T., & Oda, O. “Tree is life:” The rising of dualism and declining of mutualism among the Gedeo of southern Ethiopia. 2 (7). https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2017.00007, Frontiers in Communication: Science and Environmental Communication
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2017Milstein, T., Pileggi, M., & Morgan, E. (Eds.). Environmental Communication Pedagogy and Practice. London, UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315562148,
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2016Milstein, T. The performer metaphor: “Mother nature never gives us the same show twice.” 10 (2), 227-248. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2015.1018295, Environmental Communication
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2015Milstein, T., & Pulos, A. Culture jam pedagogy and practice: Relocating culture by staying on one’s toes. 8 (3), 395-413. https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12090, Communication, Culture, & Critique
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2012Milstein, T., & Kroløkke, C. Transcorporeal Tourism: Whales, fetuses, and the rupturing and reinscribing of cultural constraints. 6 (1), 82-100. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2011.642079, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
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2012Milstein, T. & Dickinson, E. A. Gynocentric greenwashing: The discursive gendering of nature. 5 (4), 510-532. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01144.x, Communication, Culture, & Critique
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2011Milstein, T., Anguiano, C., Sandoval, J., Chen, Y.W., & Dickinson, E. Communicating a “new” environmental vernacular: A sense of relations-in-place. 78 (4), 486-510. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2012.661445, Communication Monographs
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2011Milstein, T. Nature identification: The power of pointing and naming. 5 (1), 3-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2010.535836, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
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2009Milstein, T. ‘Somethin’ tells me it’s all happening at the zoo:’ Discourse, power, and conservationism. 3 (1), 25-48. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030802674174, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
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2008Milstein, T. When whales “speak for themselves”: Communication as a mediating force in wildlife tourism. 2 (2), 173-192. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030802141745, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture
Contact Tema for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Consulting / Advising
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision
- Location: Sydney, Australia
- Website
- X (formerly Twitter): @TemaMilstein
- Article Feed
- ORCID
- Joined