REBECCA JOHNS

Associate Professor of Geography

school of geosciences

University of South Florida

Published (recent):

Johns, Rebecca; Dixon, Barnali and Viera, Matt. “Police Violence as Containment of Black Bodies during Urban Renewal: a spatial analysis of civilian deaths by Police in Florida” Southeastern Geographer.

Johns, Rebecca; Beach, Julie, 2022. “Experiencing Nature at Weedon Island Nature Preserve: discourses of duality, willful blindness and ecological nobility.” The Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education.

McKenna, Kelly, and Johns, Rebecca, 2022. “Evaluating Engagement in Environmental Education in Florida.” The Florida Geographer. 

Flanery, Adam; Mbatu, Richard; Johns, Rebecca; Stewart, Donna, 2022. “Rural community agency in Cameroon: Interactions with forest policies and the REDD+ climate change regime.” Forest Services.

Johns, Rebecca, Dixon, Barnali and Pontes, Rachelle, 2021. “Tale of Two Neighbourhoods: Biophysical and Socio-Economic Vulnerability to Climate Change in Pinellas County, Florida.” Local Environment: the International Journal of Justice and Sustainability.

Dixon, Barnali, Fernandez, Amada, and Johns, Rebecca, 2021. “The Role of Crowdsourced Data, Participatory Decision-Making and Mapping in Resilience to Flooding.”  Applied Geography, 128.

Johns, Rebecca, and Pontes, Rachelle, 2020. “Displaying values, scripting stories: writing narratives of environmental citizenship through permanent educational exhibits at local nature preserves.”   Museum & Society, November. 18(3) 386-408

 Johns, Rebecca, and Pontes, Rachelle, 2020. “Educating with Skins and Bones: Material representations of animals in permanent exhibits at local parks.” Material Culture Vol. 52, No. 2.

Dixon, Barnali, and Johns, Rebecca, 2019. “Vision for a Holistic Smart City - HSC : Integrating Resiliency Framework via Crowdsourced Community Resiliency Information System (CRIS)*”

*ARIC'19, November 5–8, 2019, Chicago, IL, USA © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6954-1/19/11

https://doi.org/10.1145/3356395.3365541

Flanery, Adam, Mbatu, Richard, Johns, Rebecca and Stewart, Dona, 2020. “Heterogeneity and Collective Action: Community Integration Appraisal for REDD+ Forest Management Implementation,” Small Scale Forestry. Forthcoming.

Johns, Rebecca, and Pontes, Rachelle, 2019. “Environmental Education in India: constructing environmental citizens through narratives of optimism.” Education Research Highlights in Mathematics, Science and Technology. Mack Shelley and Ahmet Kiray, editors. ISRES Publishing, Iowa State University.

Johns, Rebecca. and Pontes, Rachelle. 2019. “Parks, Rhetoric and Environmental Education”, The Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, vol. 21

Johns, Rebecca, and Pontes, Rachelle, 2018. “Building Environmental Literacy Through Non-Formal Environmental Education: Challenges and Opportunities” The Florida Geographer, Fall 2018.

FORTHCOMING/under review:

Johns, Rebecca. “The Story of Us: the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the politics of the Anthropocene.” Internal Research Grant received; fieldwork conducted spring 2022. Under review at Material Culture.

Johns, Rebecca, Raines, S., Moore, A., Hill, M., Lansky, P, and Pathak, A.  “Dear Tampa Bay: Creating and Leveraging a Climate Resilience Documentary Film using Story-Telling for Citizen Engagement.” Under review at Environmental Communication.

 Johns, Rebecca, Raines, S., Moore, A., Hill, M., Lansky, P, and Pathak, A, “Educating and Empowering Local Leaders through Experiential Education for Climate Resilience in Tampa Bay, Florida.” Under review at Applied Environmental Education & Communication.

 Alegria, H. Dixon, B. R. Johns, A. Collarusso, and M. Hancock. 2023. “Using a smart city framework to advance justice: applying an equity lens to compare air quality in neighbourhoods of different socioeconomic profiles.” Under review at Local Environment.

ONGOING RESEARCH:

“Not your grandpa’s Sierra Club: examining racism and exclusion in the rhetorical construction of the environmental citizen.” book manuscript, under contract with the university of florida press.

This project presents a rhetorical analysis of the construction of the environmental citizen through the narratives of the Sierra Club in the time period from 1900 to the present.  As one of the most important environmental organizations in the United States, the Club has played a pivotal role in social conceptualizations of nature and the human-nature interface since its foundation. I ask how the Sierra Club has responded to the changing American social landscape through pivotal moments of the 20th century, and to the post-millennial period, as pressures from climate change and other anthropogenic effects of post-industrial society have mounted. I pay particular attention to the rhetorical construction of audience to ascertain the Club’s responsiveness to criticisms of exclusion of communities of color from mainstream environmentalism, outdoor recreation, and claims to knowledge about the land.  How has the Club produced, through its rhetorical narratives, paradigms of the concerned environmental citizen and concomitant appropriate environmental action? Do these paradigms adequately reflect the diversity of ways communities may define and engage nature? To what extent do the Club’s narratives maintain or undermine the iconic American wilderness ideal; respond to criticisms of exclusion, environmental racism, and eco-imperialism; and address the urgency of  21st century wicked problems? Using rhetorical analysis of historical documents in the William E. Colby Library and contemporary online bulletins, meeting minutes, press releases, and digital calls-to-action, a detailed picture of the Sierra Club’s conceptualization of audience and message over time is constructed and interrogated.

“Displaying Human-Nature Entanglements: Educational Exhibits at the Smithsonian Institute”

Natural history museums and zoos are both widely recognized sites of public education about the natural world, and can be leveraged to enhance the ecological literacy of citizens.  Exhibits create narratives which construct specific environmental values, and may reinforce or challenge status quo beliefs about the human relationship to nature. This research examines the material artifacts, and visual and textual displays at educational exhibits at two premier national institutions, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian National Zoo, to identify similarities and differences in their construction of the human-nature nexus, environmental values and concepts of ecological citizenship.

 “Exhibit, that’s to disturb harmony. Exhibit, that’s to trouble the visitor in his intellectual comfort. Exhibit, that’s to arouse emotions, anger, desire to know more.” (Arnold 2006, 257).

Urgent environmental crises demand a citizenry that is educated, informed, motivated and prepared to act. Levels of environmental literacy in the United States remain low. Recent scholarship has noted the importance of non-formal environmental education to rectify gaps in knowledge and to motivate action (McKeown & Hopkins, 2003). Natural history museums and animal exhibits at zoos are critical sites for environmental education in the United States. My work has focused on investigating the specific narratives constructed through educational displays at museums, parks and zoos, primarily in Florida (see Johns and Pontes, 2018; Johns and Pontes 2019; Johns and Pontes, forthcoming, for example). Examination of the way material exhibits construct explicit narratives about the human-environment relationship is a relatively new area of study, in which my research is making significant contributions. There is a need to better understand how popular sites of public education utilize both material artifacts and textual and visual narratives to privilege particular understandings of human relationships to nature and to advocate for specific environmental values and behaviors. The influence of prominent institutions of non-formal education on public conceptualizations of individual and collective responsibility for the environment is critical to the development of lasting solutions to our ecological crises. My work deepens our understanding of such exhibits as carriers of important cultural constructs about nature.

The proposed project expands my research on narratives of environmental citizenship in educational displays at Florida parks, preserves and zoos to the national scale to examine exhibit narratives at two of the premier institutions in the U.S.: the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Zoo, both governed by the Smithsonian Institute and located in Washington, D.C. This project is the first case-study in what will be a multi-site, national project for which I seek external funding.

Natural history museums have evolved in Europe and North America over several hundred years. From their origins as private collections of exotic artifacts and specimens gathered by the elite, collections of “natural” items evolved into public institutions with critical research and educational missions (Melber and Abraham 2002). Natural history museums have received significant attention from scholars in recent years, even as pedagogical approaches used in displays have been transformed to be more interactive and experiential. By the 1980s, the removal of glass between exhibits and visitors introduced touch to the museum experience (Melber and Abraham 2002).

Much of the discourse on museums has focused on the way human culture is displayed, but animal and landscape exhibits have also garnered attention. Like all visual displays, animal exhibits create a narrative which may reinforce or destabilize status quo beliefs about non-human animals and our relationship to them. The importance of such narratives is clear when we consider that museum exhibits of animals may often be the only encounter that visitors have with many species (Melber and Abraham 2002). Museum displays have the power to inspire and challenge long-held beliefs about human exceptionalism and dominion over non-human others. Pedersen argues that a hidden “zoocurriculum” written by visual narratives in museum displays communicates “expected responses” in audiences, directing them to view animals in particular ways (Pedersen 2010). As visual, textual and tactile displays, education exhibits may reinforce particular ideas about self and society, and more importantly for this work, about self, nature, and “other.” As Annu Jalais notes, “If…ideas of nature are fundamentally intertwined with dominant ideas of society, we need to address what ideas of society and its ordering become reproduced, excluded, or validated through images of nature” (2008, 34).

Natural history museums, however, rarely contain living animals; zoological parks are the primary place Americans go to see live animals. The human desire to engage directly with non-human others has been the focus of scholarship for some time (Berger 1980). While our lives are saturated with representations of animals, the embodied experience of inter-species contact with living others is largely believed to be a more affective and powerful experience (Bulbeck 2005). Humans living in developed countries seek out encounters with animal others in a variety of settings, including zoos and wildlife parks.  Indeed, zoos and aquariums, which typically have strong educational missions, welcome approximately 700 million visitors annually worldwide (Gusset and Dick 2011).

Through encounters with animals at zoos and aquariums, Bulbeck suggests that “really being there” is “more likely to produce changed behavior in relation to animals than mere knowledge offered by science or entertainment” (2007, xvi). Extensive research has uncovered that seeing, interacting, and connecting with animals can enhance visitors’ environmental knowledge and attitudes leading to positive environmental behavior changes (Ballantyne et al. 2011; Mazur 1998). Myers et al. (2009) argue that seeing animals in a zoo may be a catalyst for forming a positive relationship with nature and opening the door to environmental learning.  Animal displays may be seen as critical sites for understanding human-animal relationships and conveying values about human-nature interactions (Desmond 2016). Thus, both natural history museums and zoos offer powerful opportunities for visitors to encounter and engage with representations of non-human nature. Such representations, however, are far from universal or benign, and are instead influenced by institutional mission, curator knowledge and vision, and material limitations of each site. As carriers of cultural constructs about human dominion over, responsibility for, and engagement with non-human nature, museums and zoos play a critical role in citizens’ perceptions of their responsibility for the environment, and hence, cannot go unexamined.

The impact of my findings on weaknesses and strengths in material educational displays at key national sites of non-formal learning is important to efforts to expand public understanding of environmental crises and motivate individual and collective agency in ameliorating pressing problems of the environment. Comparing and contrasting a museum of natural history with a nearby zoo, both within the Smithsonian Institute, will help to illuminate the differences and similarities in paradigms of human-nature relationships produced by two connected, but dissimilar, facilities. Funded through a USF Internal Research Grant.  Estimated Date of Completion: December 2021

new research

I am currently working on three papers on the work of Henry David Thoreau.

Teaching Transcendentally: Thoreauvian mindfulness, authenticity and self-development as a pedagogical method

Confronting our Transgressions: examining early animal rights in antebellum New England through the work of Henry David Thoreau

early children’s literature and thoreauvian worldviews

Please email me for more information.

PAST PROJECTS:

Gruber, Jessica, Mbatu, Richard, Dixon, Barnali and Johns, Rebecca, 2017. "Factors that influence success of conservation practice: Re-framing the traditional biological factors approach to an integrated holistic approach" Natural Resources Forum.

 Johns, Rebecca, and Merton, Elizabeth, 2015. “Neglected Yards and Community Landscaping,” The Southeastern Geographer.

Johns, Rebecca, Dixon, Barnali, McHan, Chris and Westmark, Zach, 2013. “Evaluating Food Deserts in St. Petersburg, Florida.”  The Florida Geographer  44: 15-37.

Mustafa D, Smucker T A, Ginn F, Johns R, Connely S, 2010, "Xeriscape people and the cultural politics of turfgrass transformation" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(4) 600 – 617.

Johns, Rebecca A., 2009. “Assessing The Social And Ecological Impact Of Voluntary Simplicity,”  Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences  32:262-271.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 2008. “Ecologically Appropriate Residential Landscaping in Pinellas County, Florida: Barriers and Incentives.”  Papers of the Applied Geography Conference 31:283-291.

 Johns, Rebecca A., Connelly, Shanon, Dorsey Joseph ,Krest, Jim, Mustafa, Daanish, Smucker, Thomas, 2007. “Xeriscaping as Coastal Amelioration: using “Florida Friendly Landscaping” to reduce pollutant runoff and water consumption in Pinellas County, Florida,” Interdisciplinary Environmental Review X, (2): 113-141.

 Johns, Rebecca A.,  2005. "The Potential of Geographic Analysis in Solving Environmental Dilemmas.” Interdisciplinary Environmental Review VII (2): 13-33.

 Schmidt, Nancy, Mark Luther, and Rebecca Johns. 2004. “Climate variability and estuarine water resources: A case study from Tampa Bay, Florida.” Coastal Management 32(2):101-116.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 2003. “Remembering Our Place: Ethical Activism for Scholars” Ethics, Place and Environment  6(1): 56-61.

 Johns, Rebecca, 2001. “Identifying Barriers to Native American Participation in Higher Education,” Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences  24: 322-331.

 Johns, Rebecca, 2001. "Understanding the Influences of Global Processes and Local Context in the Construction of Nature in South Asia: Teaching Strategies," Teaching South Asia.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 2001. “Arbitration as a Decision-Making Tool: The Tampa Bay Water Case, Southeastern Geographer 41 (1) pp.117-135.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 2000. “Building Unity in a Common Place: Intentional Communities in the United States,” Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences 23:1-9.

 Johns, Rebecca A., and Vural, Leyla, 2000. “Class, Geography and the Consumerist Turn: UNITE and the Stop Sweatshops Campaign,”  Environment and Planning A 32(7):1193-1213.

 Sen, Bagchi, Cline-Cole, R., DeFillipis, J., Douglass, M., Emel, J., Hanson, S., Johns, R., Lake, R., Lawson, V., Leaf, M., Leichenko, R., Marston, S., McGee, T., Pandit, K., Pincetl, S., Schroeder, R., Sheppard, E., and Waterstone, M., 1999. “Toward a Comprehensive Geographical Perspective on Urban Sustainability,”  Final Report of the 1998 NSF Workshop on Urban Sustainability, Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 1998. "Bridging the Gap Between Class and Space: U.S. Worker Solidarity with Guatemala."  Economic Geography 74(3): 252-271.

 Johns, Rebecca A., 1993. "Class and Place in the New World Order: International Labor Solidarity," The Middle States Geographer 26.

 Lake, Robert W. and Johns, Rebecca A., 1990. "Legitimation Conflicts: The Politics of Hazardous Waste Siting Law," Urban Geography, Vol. II (5): 488-508.

  Other Publications:

 Johns, Rebecca, 1999. “It’s Time to Debate Our Mission,” Advocate (for NEA members in Higher Education), Vol. 1, No. 8, August.

 Johns, Rebecca, 2000. “Interview: Charlene Teters on Native American Symbols as Mascots,” Thought & Action,  Volume XVI, Number 1, Summer, pages 121-130.

Organizing Experience:

Dr. Johns has been organizing for environmental, racial and global justice for nearly 50 years. Starting at the age of 14, she worked with the Friends of the Earth, and the Sempervirens Fund to protect endangered species, including Canis Lupus and the majestic Redwoods of her native California. In high school, she helped organize support for Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and then in college, she was active in the Anti-Apartheid movement and the movement to support democratic governments in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Later, in Madison, Wisconsin, she helped found the Third World Coalition, an organization of member groups working to combat U.S. imperialist endeavors in developing countries, support people’s movements for sovereignty, and eliminate racism in the U.S.. She was an active member of the American Federation of Teachers and the Take Back the Night movement. In New York, Dr. Johns worked for the Palestine Aid Society and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, where she helped organize Latinx hat makers in the south Bronx and rural clothing workers in New Jersey. She worked with the Kentuckians for the Commonwealth in southern Appalachia fighting Big Coal, and after coming to Florida, she worked with the Uhuru movement following the murder of Tyron Lewis. In St. Petersburg, she has continued to support grassroots efforts around racism against African Americans and Native Americans, especially in the college curriculum and in the continued use of racist sports mascots. Through her work as the Director of Community Outreach and Education, Dr. Johns has continued to work closely with marginalized communities, community leaders and NGOs around issues related to climate and environmental justic.

GRADUATE STUDENTS (Recent)

Ms. Julie Beach, Master of Liberal Arts, Florida Studies

Ms. Rachelle Pontes, Master of Liberal Arts in Florida Studies

Ms. Kelly McKenna, Master of Science in Environmental Science and Policy

Dr. Lauren Drakopulos, Ph.D., Geography, University of Washington M.S. ESP

Dr. Kyle Buck, Ph.D., Geography, University of South Carolina, M.S., ESP

Ms. Lindsay Brendis, Master of Arts in Environmental Science and Policy

Ms. Raina Crumby, Master of Arts in Environmental Science and Policy