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Peter K. Bsumek is a Professor in the School of Communication Studies at James Madison University, where he has served as the director of the MA program in Communication and Advocacy and coordinator of the undergraduate interdisciplinary Environmental Studies minor program. His research and teaching focus on rhetoric and the processes of advocacy and decision-making in social change, with a specific emphasis in environmental communication.  

He is the 2014 recipient of the National Communication Association, Environmental Communication Division’s J. Robert Cox Award for Environmental Communication and Civic Engagement. He has also won the Christine Oravec Research Award (2014) and Tarla Peterson Award for the Environmental Communication Book of the Year (2016). Bsumek teaches courses in environmental communication & advocacy, social movement rhetoric, advocacy, and rhetoric.

He is currently co-editing a special Research Topic, Communication, Race, and Outdoor Spaces. His previous scholarship has focused on the climate change rhetoric and advocacy of the fossil fuel industry and the climate justice movement:

Schnieder, J., Scwarze, S., Bsumek, P., and Peeples, J. (2016). Under pressure: Coal industry rhetoric and neoliberalism. London: Palgrave MacMillan UK. Tarla Rai Peterson Outstanding Environmental Communication Book of the Year, 2016. Reviewed in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Theory, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and The Energy Journal.

Carroll, J. and Bsumek, P. (2021). “All this regulatory uncertainty in the air”: The indispensability of public hearings in guarding and guiding public deliberation. Frontiers in Science and Environmental Communication, 6:675218. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.675218

Bsumek, P., Schwarze, S., Peeples, J. and Schneider, J. (2019). Strategic gestures in Bill McKibben’s climate change rhetoric. Frontiers in Science and Environmental Communication, 4:40. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2019.00040

Bsumek, P. (2018). Communication and neoliberalism. In Dana Cloud (Ed) Oxford Encyclopedia of Communication and Critical Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.583

Bsumek, P., Schnider, J., Schwarz, S., and Peeples, J. (2014). Corporate Ventriloquism: Corporate advocacy, the coal industry, and the appropriation of voice (21-43).  In Jennifer Peeples and Steven Depoe (Eds.).  Environmental Communication and Voice. London: Palgrave MacMillan UK.  2014 Christine L. Oravec Research Award.

Peeples, J., Bsumek, P., Schwarze, S., and Schneider, J. (2014). Industrial Apocalyptic: Neoliberalism, Coal, and the Burlesque Frame. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 17 (2), 227-254.

Schwarze, S., Peeples, J., Schneider, J., and Bsumek, P. (2014).  Environmental melodrama, coal, and the politics of sustainable energy in The Last Mountain. International Journal of Sustainable Development, 17 (2), 108-122.

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