Areas of Expertise:  wildlife tourism, ecotourism, zoos, ecoculture, cetaceans, orcas, dolphins

Languages:  English

Associated Organization: University of New South Wales Sydney

Tema Milstein is an internationally recognised leader in the field of environmental communication, a transdisciplinary field that understands communication as having far-reaching effects at a time of human-generated environmental crises. She is particularly known for cultural approaches to studying how communication shapes ecological understandings, identities, and actions. Her work tends to discourses that otherwise go unnoticed, to connections between discourses and wider destructive or restorative practices, and to paths toward sustainable, just, and regenerative futures. Her research spans the globe, illustrating tensions between overarching and marginalized environmental meaning systems, examining ecotourism and environmental activism, and establishing the study of ecocultural identities. 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 is the 2020 recipient of the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Architecture Dean’s Research Award for Society Impact. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington.

Read the rest of Tema’s bio here.