Nestwork by Jennifer Clary-Lemon

Nestwork by Jennifer Clary-Lemon

As more and more species fall under the threat of extinction, humans are not only taking action to protect critical habitats but are also engaging more directly with species to help mitigate their decline. Through innovative infrastructure design and by changing how we live, humans are becoming more attuned to nonhuman animals and are making efforts to live alongside them.

Examining sites of loss, temporal orientations, and infrastructural mitigations, Nestwork blends rhetorical and posthuman sensibilities in service of the ecological care. In this innovative ethnographic study, rhetorician Jennifer Clary-Lemon examines human-nonhuman animal interactions, identifying forms of communication between species and within their material world. Looking in particular at nonhuman species that depend on human development for their habitat, Clary-Lemon examines the cases of the barn swallow, chimney swift, and bobolink. She studies their habitats along with the unique mitigation efforts taken by humans to maintain those habitats, including building “barn swallow gazebos” and artificial chimneys and altering farming practices to allow for nesting and breeding. What she reveals are fascinating forms of rhetoric not expressed through language but circulating between species and materials objects.

Nestwork explores what are in essence nonlinguistic and decidedly nonhuman arguments within these local environments. Drawing on new materialist and Indigenous ontologies, the book helps attune our senses to the tragedy of species decline and to a new understanding of home and homemaking.

“If Clary-Lemon’s Nestwork is about ecological care, it is also itself an act of ecological care: a material-symbolic act of resistance and love and hope”

—Joshua Trey Barnett ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature & Environment

“By thoughtfully blending rhetorical, new-materialist, and posthumanist approaches, Clary-Lemon illuminates the rhetorical capacity of more-than-human others and demonstrates how an attunement to their arguments might reorient human-nonhuman relations in the face of environmental precarity and species decline.”

—Dylan Annandale Rhetoric Society Quarterly

“Clary-Lemon is a rare combination: a talented theorist and a talented storyteller. Working in common with the barn swallow, the chimney swift, and the bobolink, she weaves together the ecological, the rhetorical, and the posthuman to invite us to pay attention differently to birds, to humans, to infrastructure, and to the ways we might make and care for these relations.”

—Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Professor of Composition and Rhetoric, University of Wisconsin–Madison

Jennifer Clary-Lemon is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Planting the Anthropocene: Rhetorics of Natureculture.