UC Riverside

Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Aquarium of the Pacific and Michel Foucault's governmentality and biopolitics as an overarching theoretical frame, this dissertation engages in a political ecological analysis to explore how the institution, its staff, and nonhumans work to produce various sorts of knowledge about the environment. I argue that the educative assemblages imagined and formed there, which are intimately linked to institutional fiscal survivability, politically deploy nonhuman animals in the Aquarium's "edutainment" project. Through the use of storytelling as a pedagogical tool to entertain, invoke compassion, and convey science to the public, staff encourage guests to have tactile, auditory, and visual encounters with live ocean creatures in order to construct a natural world worthy of being saved, due to its instrumental and intrinsic value. I show how this public conservation re-education project attempts to highlight the voices of the animals being represented there, but not necessarily the voices of the animals actually residing there. I also draw out the implications of these representative practices and argue that the institution ought to utilize staff-nonhuman relationships, which are grounded in care and empathy, as a framework for developing visitor-nonhuman relationships.