Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
English Language and Literatures
First Advisor
John Muckelbauer
Abstract
In this project, I notice how we listen and respond to animals, both through marine bioacoustics studies and rhetorical theory, and consider how we might develop new ways of noticing and interacting with animals. I hold together rhetorical theory, marine bioacoustics studies, and my observations nest sitting sea turtles to see what kind of multispecies ethic emerges from messy encounters with nonhuman others – specifically, with sea turtles nesting on the beaches of the Outer Banks in the Summer of 2020. By confronting the unavoidable moments of indecision, and even possible violence, inherent to encounters with nonhumans others, even and especially when approached through the lens of “sensing,” I reach towards a way of thinking about and interacting with nonhumans that is guided by a fundamental curiosity about who and what counts in our “survey of all available means of persuasion” and that doesn’t assume we can get along, or at least redefines what “getting along” means.
My aim in this project is to reach for an ethical practice of navigating this nonhuman world as best as we can, using all of our available senses and means of persuasion to move in more or less harmful ways – with a relentless curiosity about our nonhuman entanglements and the wherewithal to confront the lived experience of those entanglements, however fraught, uncomfortable, or disharmonious.
Rights
© 2025, Alissa Reed
Recommended Citation
Reed, A.(2025). Sensing Others. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8386