Stradling, F. and Hobbs, V. orcid.org/0000-0001-8892-2779 (2025) ‘From there everything changed’: conversion narrative in the biomimicry movement. Critical Discourse Studies, 22 (1). pp. 1-18. ISSN 1740-5904
Abstract
An increasingly influential approach to solving human ecological problems is an innovative design practice known as biomimicry. The Biomimicry Institute, a major stakeholder in the Biomimicry Movement, promotes biomimicry as a practice that mimics nature’s genius to solve human challenges and provides hope of sustainable futures. Despite increasing global interest in the practice, so far little is known about the value placed on biomimicry within practitioner communities. Employing a corpus-assisted discourse-analytic approach, this paper explores the ways video narratives shared by practitioners affiliated with and curated by the Biomimicry Institute position biomimicry as a sacred practice. Drawing on Stibbe’s ecolinguistic approach and Hobbs’ functional religious language framework, we observe an overarching discursive pattern of conversion narrative (incorporating both personal and collective storylines) which highlights the sacred significance of the movement. We explore how the linguistic strategies underlying these conversion narratives centre human experience, mark group identity and attract new converts, while constructing an ecologically ambivalent discourse. In particular, we find that use of vague language obscures the precise nature of involvement in the movement and blurs the lines between member and non-member, contributing to the conversion narratives’ potential as powerful proselytising tools.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. |
Keywords: | Biomimicry; framing; religious language; social movements; conversion narratives; critical discourse analysis; ecolinguistics |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 13 Oct 2023 13:23 |
Last Modified: | 20 Feb 2025 14:53 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor and Francis Group |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/17405904.2023.2266513 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:204220 |
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