The Voices of the Residents: A Discursive Construction of West Virginia Chemical Spill

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Health Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

When 10,000 gallons of MCHM leaked from a reservoir of Freedoms Industries water distribution into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia in 2014, it created an environmental catastrophe, which compelled the government to take immediate action to mitigate the crisis. Given the issues above, this study utilizes a culture-centered approach to health communication (Dutta, 2007) to interrogate critically the discourses of the residents of Charleston, in the heart of Appalachia, surrounded by coal-mining industries and chemical plants. The study investigates how the residents belonging to low socio-economic status (SES) received information about the chemical spill, and the ways in which they made sense of environmental disaster as they experienced it. This culture-centered approach contributes to the understandings of the ways in which the environmental crisis are discursively produced by the communities of people that are most affected by it by the virtue of living in an environmentally vulnerable region.

Author

• Purba Das, Ohio U Southern