Sharpiegate
Science, the state and professional vision in the constitution of weather
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.20640Keywords:
professional vision, weather, seeing, Hurricane Dorian, science, stateAbstract
In this article, we use the case of Hurricane Dorian, which hit the southeastern United States in 2019, to expand on the scholarship about professional vision by taking up how weather is materialized in the negotiation of seeing between members of the scientific community and the state. Attending to the controversy known popularly as Sharpiegate, in which President Donald Trump, the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Birmingham (Alabama) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) offered conflicting accounts of Hurricane Dorian’s predicted path, we use discourse analysis to examine four tweets, a NOAA official statement and the Commerce Department’s investigative report to show how institutional actors negotiated their entitlement to see, accounts of what was seen and accountability to their claims as seers. We argue that Sharpiegate significantly disrupted the relationship between science and the state, which depends upon scientists’ professional re-semiotizing of hurricanes in images which the state can use to legitimize its crisis response. Our findings show how NOAA and the Commerce Department utilize strategic ambiguity, distributed agency and accountability and the careful maintenance of boundaries in their claims of what was seen and what counts as legitimate seeing in weather forecasting.
References
Avila, Lixion A., Stacy R. Stewart, Robbie Berg and Andrew B. Hagen (2020) Tropical cyclone report: Hurricane Dorian. National Hurricane Center. Online: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL052019_Dorian.pdf
Baker, Zeke (2017) Climate state: Science-state struggles and the formation of climate science in the US from the 1930s to 1960s. Social Studies of Science 47 (6): 861–887. https://www.doi.org/10.1177/0306312717725205
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1984) [1929] Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bartesaghi, Mariaelena (2014) Coordination: Examining weather as a ‘matter of concern’. Communication Studies 65 (5): 535–557. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2014.957337
Carlisle, Madeleine (2020) Newly-released NOAA emails show anger and confusion around Trump’s ‘doctored’ Hurricane Dorian map. Time, 1 February. Online: https://time.com/5775953/trump-dorian-alabama-sharpiegate-noaa/
Carr, Rachel H., Burrell Montz, Keri Maxfield, Stephanie Hoekstra, Kathryn Semmens and Elizabeth Goldman (2016) Effectively communicating risk and uncertainty to the public: Assessing the National Weather Service’s flood forecast and warning tools. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 97 (9): 1649–1665. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00248.1
Cooren, François (2004) Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings.
Organization 11 (3): 373–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508404041998
Cooren, François (2010) Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cullen, James (2019) The storm has moved on, but Alabamans are still divided over Trump’s fake Hurricane Dorian warning. Insider, 12 September. Online: https://www.insider.com/hurricane-dorian-alabama-controversy-birmingham-divided-2019-9
Draucker, Fawn and Lauren Collister (2015) Managing participation through modal affordances on Twitter. Open Library of Humanities 1 (1): Article e8. http://dx.doi.org/10.16995/olh.21
Dunn Tenpas, Kathryn (2021) Tracking turnover in the Trump administration. Brookings, January. Online: https://www.brookings.edu/research/tracking-turnover-in-the-trumpadministration/Duranti, Alessandro and Charles
Goodwin (eds) (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eitelmann, Matthias and Ulrike Schneider (2020) Linguistic Inquiries into Donald Trump’s Language: From ‘Fake News’ to ‘Tremendous Success’. New York: Bloomsbury.
Fiallo, Josh (2021) Florida is in Elsa’s cone of uncertainty. What does that mean exactly? Tampa Bay Times, 1 July. Online: https://www.tampabay.com/hurricane/2021/07/01/florida-is-in-elsas-cone-of-uncertainty-what-does-that-mean-exactly/
Freedman, Andrew and Jason Samenow (2020a) Investigation rebukes Commerce Department for siding with Trump over forecasters during Hurricane Dorian. Washington Post, 9 July. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/07/09/sharpiegateinspector-general-final-report/
Freedman, Andrew and Jason Samenow (2020b) New emails show how President Trump roiled NOAA during Hurricane Dorian. Washington Post, 1 February. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/01/new-emails-show-how-presidenttrump-roiled-noaa-during-hurricane-dorian/
Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Goldhill, Olivia (2017) Rhetoric scholars pinpoint why Trump’s inarticulate speaking style is so persuasive. Quartz, 22 April. Online: https://qz.com/965004/rhetoric-scholarspinpoint-why-trumps-inarticulate-speaking-style-is-so-persuasive/
Goodwin, Charles (1994) Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96 (3): 606–633. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100
Gordon, Cynthia (2006) Reshaping prior text, reshaping identities. Text & Talk 26 (4–5): 545–571. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2006.022
Greene, David and Mary S. Hodgin (2019) Debate over the politicization of weather intensifies. NPR, 10 September. Online: https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759384645/debate-over-the-politicization-of-weather-intensifies
Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein and Matthew B. Ingram (2016) The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2): 71–100. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.2.009
Hall, Rogers (2018) Learning from Chuck Goodwin. Journal of the Learning Sciences 27 (4): 666–671. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2018.1530542
Harper, Kristine C. (2017) Make it Rain: State Control of the Atmosphere in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2014.02.002
Iedema, Rick (2003) Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual Communication 2 (1): 29–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357203002001751
Jessop, Bob (2013) Putting neoliberalism in its time and place: A response to the debate. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 21 (1): 65–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12003
Jones, Rodney H. (2020) Towards an embodied visual semiotics: Negotiating the right to look. In Crispin Thurlow, Christa Dürscheid and Federica Diémoz (eds) Visualizing Digital Discourse: Interactional, Institutional and Ideological Perspectives, 19–41. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501510113-002
Latour, Bruno (2017) Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Lavelle, Marianne (2020). Wheeler in Wisconsin: Putting a green veneer on the actions of Trump’s EPA. Inside Climate News, 18 June. Online: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17062020/wheeler-wisconsin-epa-green-clean-air
Lenk, Uta (1998) Marking Discourse Coherence: Functions of Discourse Markers in Spoken English. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Levin, David M. (1993) Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. (1988) Putting linguistics on a proper footing: Explorations in Goffman’s participation framework. In Paul Drew and Anthony Wootton (eds) Erving Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, 161–227. Oxford: Polity Press.
Lillis, Theresa and Janet Maybin (2017) Introduction: The dynamics of textual trajectories in professional and workplace practice. Text & Talk 37 (4): 409–414. https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2017-0017
Lymer, Gustav (2009) Demonstrating professional vision: The work of critique in architectural education. Mind, Culture, and Activity 16 (2): 145–171. https://doi.org.10.1080/10749030802590580
Mehan, Hugh (1996) The construction of an LD student: A case study in the politics of representation. In Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (eds) Natural Histories of Discourse, 253–276. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas (2011) The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Murthy, Dhiraj (2012) Towards a sociological understanding of social media: Theorizing Twitter. Sociology 46 (6): 1059–1073. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0038038511422553
Nagel, Thomas (1986) The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) (2019). Statement from NOAA. 6 September. Online: https://www.noaa.gov/news/statement-from-noaa
Novy-Marx, Robert (2014) Predicting anomaly performance with politics, the weather, global warming, sunspots, and the stars. Journal of Financial Economics 112 (2): 137–146.
NWS [National Weather Service] Birmingham [@NWSBirmingham] (2019) Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east. #alwx. Twitter, 1 September. Online: https://twitter.com/NWSBirmingham/status/1168179647667814400
Ochs, Elinor and Lisa Capps (1996) Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology 25(1): 19–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.25.1.19
Office of Inspector General (2020) Evaluation of NOAA’s September 6, 2019, statement about Hurricane Dorian forecasts: Final report no. OIG-20-032-1. U.S. Department of Commerce website, 26 June. Online: https://www.oig.doc.gov/OIGPublications/OIG-20-032-I.pdf
Parks, Lisa (2001) Satellite views of Srebrenica: Tele-visuality and the politics of witnessing. Social Identities 7 (4): 585–611. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630120107728
Pietruska, Jamie (2019) Why President Trump’s Sharpied weather map was likely a crime – and should be. Washington Post, 6 September. Online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/06/why-president-trumps-sharpied-weather-map-was-likely-crimeshould-be/
Politi, Daniel (2019) NOAA contradicts Weather Service, backs Trump in warning Dorian could impact Alabama. Slate, 7 September. Online: https://slate.com/news-andpolitics/2019/09/noaa-contradicts-national-weather-service-trump-dorian-alabama.html
Pomerantz, Anita (1986) Extreme case formulations: A way of legitimizing claims. Human Studies 9: 219–229. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00148128
Prilop, Christopher N., Kira E. Weber and Marc Kleinknecht (2021) The role of expert feedback in the development of pre-service teachers’ professional vision of classroom management in an online blended learning environment. Teaching and Teacher Education 99: Article 103276. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2020.103276
Ravotas, Doris and Carol Berkenkotter (1998) Voices in the text: The uses of reported speech in a psychotherapist’s notes and initial assessments. Text 18 (2): 211–239. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.1.1998.18.2.211
Sacks, Harvey (1992) Lectures on Conversation. 2 vols. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Sarangi, Srikant (2007) Editorial: The anatomy of interpretation. Coming to terms with the analyst’s paradox in professional discourse studies. Text & Talk 27 (5–6): 567–584. https://doi.org/10.1515/TEXT.2007.025
Sarangi, Srikant (2019) Communication research ethics and some paradoxes in qualitative inquiry. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice 12 (1): 94–121. https://doi.org/10.1558/jalpp.36885
Sarangi, Srikant and Angus Clarke (2010) Zones of expertise and the management of uncertainty in genetics risk communication. Research on Language and Social Interaction 35 (2): 139–171. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327973RLSI3502_2
Sarangi, Srikant and Celia Roberts (1999) Talk, Work and Institutional Order: Discourse in Medical, Mediation and Management Settings. New York: De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110208375
Sarangi, Srikant and Stefaan Slembrouck (2013) [1996] Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control. London: Routledge.
Scollon, Ron (1996) Discourse identity, social identity, and confusion in intercultural communication. Intercultural Communication Studies 6 (1): 1–16. Online: https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/01-Ron-Scollon.pdf
Shao, Wanyun and Kirby Goidel (2016) Seeing is believing? An examination of perceptions of local weather conditions and climate change among residents in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Risk Analysis 36 (11): 2136–2157. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.12571
Shatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr Cetina and Eike von Savigny (eds) (2001) The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. London: Routledge.
Sherin, Miriam G. (2007) The development of teachers’ professional vision in video clubs. In Video Research in the Learning Sciences, 383–395. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Shuman, Amy (2010) Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Smith, Dorothy (1978) K is mentally ill: The anatomy of a factual account. Sociology 12 (1): 23–53. https://doi.org/info:doi/
Smith, Dorothy (2005) Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Smith, Robin J. and Paul Atkinson (2016) Method and measurement in sociology, fifty years on. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 19 (1): 99–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2015.1068010
Smithberger, Leanna K. (2021) The Communicative Constitution of Environment: Land, Weather, Climate. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Tampa, University of South Florida.
Sobien, Dan [@formpres_nwseo] (2019) Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight #NOAA. Twitter, 6 September. Online: https://twitter.com/formpres_nwseo/status/1170115531388719105
Spann, James [@spann] (2019) The tweet from NWS Birmingham was spot on and accurate. If they are coming after them, they might as well come after me. How in the world has it come to this? Twitter, 6 September. Online: https://twitter.com/spann/status/1170089361834237955
Squires, Lauren (2016) Twitter: The implications of public text. In Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spilioti (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, 239–255. London: Routledge.
Trump, Donald J. [@realDonaldTrump] (2019a) I am monitoring Hurricane Dorian and receiving frequent briefings and updates. Twitter, 31 August. Online: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1167651639806898176
Trump, Donald J. [@realDonaldTrump] (2019b) In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Twitter, 1 September. Online: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1168174613827899393
White House [@WhiteHouse] (2019) President @realDonaldTrump gives an update on Hurricane #Dorian. Twitter, 4 September. Online: https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1169300628000124929
Published
Issue
Section
License
Equinox Publishing Ltd.