Abstract: Grappling with hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses circulating around the spotted lanternfly, a species of planthopper accidentally introduced to the U.S. around 2014, in this presentation I argue that “rhetorical disturbances” unsettle the “violent rhetorical ecologies” in which many of us encounter species deemed “invasive.” Rhetorical disturbances insert complexity, uncertainty, and ambivalence into rhetorical ecologies that have been made to seem stable and settled. And in doing so, I claim, they clear a space for thinking anew our relations with more-than-human others. Building on Hannah Arendt’s reflections on thinking, I suggest that rhetorical disturbances do not promise resolution to vexing moral challenges so much as they keep alive crucial ethical questions entailed by earthly coexistence.

Bio: Joshua Trey Barnett (Ph.D., University of Utah) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is jointly appointed at the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. He is the author of the award-winning book Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence and of more than thirty essays, articles, and book chapters.