Environmental Communication, 2014
Vol. 8, No. 3, 267–285, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2013.850108
Places and People: Rhetorical
Constructions of “Community” in a
Canadian Environmental Risk
Assessment
Philippa Spoel & Rebecca C. Den Hoed
This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts
through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of
mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burke’s concept of terministic screens
and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of
“community” in the Sudbury Soils Study’s official discourse and the citizen-activist
rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal
and visual clusters within each organization’s articulation of “community” as place
and people reveals how the official Study’s technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committee’s
contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community”
are mutually constitutive in that the official Study’s mainstream risk discourse
establishes the terms for the Community Committee’s reactive counter-discourse, thus
limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our
rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the
complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for
potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen
engagement.
Keywords: community; public engagement; risk; citizenship; rhetoric
Dr Phillipa Spoel is Full Professor in the Department of English at Laurentian University, Ontario.
Rebecca C. Den Hoed is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at the University of Calgary.
Correspondence to: Phillipa Spoel, Department of English, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario P3E 2C6,
Canada. Email: pspoel@laurentian.ca
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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Introduction
Questions concerning the value, possibilities, and meanings of public engagement in
risk contexts figure prominently in recent environmental and science communication
research.1 As Irwin (2009) comments, “openness, transparency, and engagement are
beguiling concepts but they also provoke (or should provoke) profound questions
about their meaning, formulation, and practice (especially when applied to specific
contexts and situations” (p. 12). Here, we explore the complex, contested issue of
public—and specifically community—participation in the context of the Sudbury
Soils Study, a risk assessment of soil contamination in Northern Ontario completed
in 2009. Cited by the Canadian government as a model of “community-based
participatory risk assessment” (Infrastructure Canada, 2005, p. 10), the Sudbury Soils
Study claimed public communication, accountability, and engagement as key
dimensions of its process. However, the release of the first portion of the Study’s
findings in June 2008 prompted the creation of the Community Committee on the
Sudbury Soils Study (CCSSS), a citizen activist group that claimed that the official
Study did not sufficiently or appropriately facilitate community involvement in the
process.
Rather than addressing directly questions about how successful or appropriate
this risk assessment’s modes of public involvement were, we address prior questions
about the role of the value-laden term “community” within the situation.2
Specifically, how did the official Study and the subsequently formed activist group
rhetorically configure the privileged concept of “community” as a key element in
their differing versions of the risk assessment process and outcomes? How did their
different configurations of “community” entail different forms of public participation
in the assessment process?
Based on a constitutive view of environmental communication (i.e., that language
shapes—rather than simply reflects—what people know, think, feel, and do about the
environment (Cox, 2010; Herndl & Brown, 1996), our analysis extends this research
to include how “community” is rhetorically constituted to better understand the
contested versions of reality that animate public discourses of risk assessment.
Similarly to Hamilton (2003) and Katz and Miller (1996), we explore the complex,
uneasy relations between lay-citizen and expert-regulatory modes of risk communication, in this case by focusing on how the value-term “community” is rhetorically
enacted within the Sudbury Soils Study context. By attending to each group’s
constitution of the people and places that make up community, our study likewise
contributes to research on how diverse meanings of place are mediated through
communication practices that form interpretive contexts for environmental policy
and action (Cantrill, 1998).
Drawing on Burke’s (1966) concept of terministic screens and method of cluster
criticism, we trace the clustering of verbal and visual terms that surround the key
term “community” in a small but pivotal set of public communication artifacts
produced by the Sudbury Soils Study and the CCSSS. Principally, we examine
documents crafted for public circulation linked to the May 2008 release of the
Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community”
269
Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) results, which stimulated the creation
of the CCSSS. We compare the meanings and functions of “community” in the
official discourse of the Sudbury Soils Study’s HHRA Summary report and
newsletter with its enactment in the CCSSS’s rhetorical responses to the report,
as articulated in its written submission during the public comment period for the
HHRA and announcement for a public forum on mining-based contamination in
three communities held in February 2009. We also consider the senses of
“community” verbally and visually constructed through aspects of each organization’s website.
This analysis shows how both groups appeal to the commonplace topic of
“community” and how they both characterize this topic according to two main subtopics: (1) what kind of place is community? and (2) what kinds of people make up
community? However, tracing the specific associational clusters within each
organization’s articulation of these sub-topics reveals their largely conflicting views
of “community” and its role in environmental policy-making. Taken together, the
verbal and visual clusters within the Sudbury Soils Study discourse mobilize rhetorical
configurations of “community” that exemplify a technical-regulatory ideology of
environmental risk in which government and industry manage the production of
scientific information within a geographic region for consumption by non-expert
residents. Conversely, the clustering of words and images in the CCSSS materials
constructs a contestatory configuration of “community” associated with an environmental justice ideology that emphasizes threats of contamination to geographic
regions and citizens’ rights to live in a nontoxic environment and to participate in
decision making that affects their health and the well-being of the local environment
(Cox, 2010, p. 271).
Despite Paehlke’s (2009) claim that the Canadian environmental movement has
moved beyond the politics of protest, and despite increasing calls for democratic,
upstream forms of citizen participation in environmental and science knowledgemaking and policy-making (e.g., Depoe, Delicath, & Elsenbeer, 2004; Irwin, 2001;
Wynne, 2005; Stilgoe & Wilsdon, 2009), our analysis indicates that technocratic and
reactive-protest modes of environmental communication still figure centrally in risk
assessment contexts. As Wynne (2005) argues, although a “huge flowering of
practical and analytical work aimed at … public engagement, dialogue and mutual
understanding between science and publics” has occurred recently, contemporary
scientific-institutional culture continues to impose a reductive technical “risk” frame
on issues of public concern, thereby limiting “participation” to questions of
“downstream” impacts or “instrumental consequences” on citizens (pp. 66–67).
This dominant framing “embeds a corresponding implicit projection of the citizensubject, “the public,” which constructs them as having a common objective
instrumental frame of meaning—risk and fear of its manifestation” (Wynne, 2002,
p. 462). Importantly, not only does this authoritative discourse position citizens
primarily as “reactive” (Irwin, 2001, p. 13), but also activist groups may reproduce its
basic categories resulting in “restricted” counter-discourse (Wynne, 2005, p. 76).
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Thus, although the CCSSS critique of the official Study enacts a politically and
ethically significant counter-discourse and although it accomplishes this critique in
part through a rhetoric of “community” that opposes the official version, we also
should consider how the CCSSS’s rhetoric is constituted and constrained by the
official Study’s framing of the situation and its implied citizenship ideology. The
CCSSS discourse not only destabilizes but also (partially) re-enacts institutional
categories that define what is at issue in this context, specifically concerning the kinds
of places and people that make up the community.
Context and Organizational Profiles
The Sudbury Soils Study risk assessment was initiated in 2003 in response to a 2001
soil survey by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, which found elevated levels
of metal and arsenic contamination caused by mining activities in the Sudbury area of
Northern Ontario (Ontario Ministry of the Environment, 2003). Funded by the two
main mining companies operating in the area and managed by a government–
industry alliance, the Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessment was mandated
to determine whether the levels of metals in the soil posed an unacceptable health risk
to people or the environment. The results of the Human Health Risk Assessment
(HHRA), the first portion of the Study, were released at community information
sessions in May 2008, with results of the Ecological Risk Assessment delayed until
March 2009. The HHRA (our focus here) reported “negligible risk” to human health
from levels of arsenic, cobalt, copper, and selenium and “minimal risk” in localized
areas from lead and nickel. The Ecological Risk Assessment found that approximately
one half of the vegetation in the study area had been moderately to severely impacted
by mining activities, and natural recovery continued to be at risk.3
Throughout its duration, the Sudbury Soils Study stated its commitment to being
an “Open, Public Process,” highlighting its numerous public communication
activities (e.g., newsletters, open houses, website, and information-inquiry phone
line) and community “input” solicited through workshops with residents on selecting
local foods, animal species, and recreational areas for inclusion in the assessment
(Sudbury Soils Study, n.d.a). Besides, the Study promoted its creation of a “Public
Advisory Committee” composed of “volunteer citizens” and the position of
“Independent Process Observer” designated to review the study process and
“represent the interests of both the general public and the environment” (Sudbury
Soils Study, n.d.a).4 However, the Study’s procedures for creating an “Open, Public
Process” were restricted mainly to a transmission-transparency mode of communication (Spoel & Barriault, 2011; Katz & Miller, 1996) with no deliberative role for
citizens in determining the risk assessment parameters or process.
Perhaps most significantly, the Public Advisory Committee had no decisionmaking power; its role was to “facilitate community involvement” and “promote the
flow of information” between the “Technical Committee (TC)” and members of the
public (Sudbury Soils Study, 2008). Composed of six “partners” or “stakeholders”
from government and industry (including the provincial Ministry of the
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Environment, district health unit, municipality, First Nations and Inuit federal health
agency, and two main mining companies operating in the area), the TC was the
decision-making body responsible for “overall management of the process” (Sudbury
Soils Study, n.d.b). By selecting and overseeing the expert consultants hired to
undertake the assessment, the TC consolidated the power of the science–government–industry alliance in this situation.
In response to the release of this “public authority knowledge” (Wynne, 2008)
through the HHRA report, several local activist citizens as well as non-local
environmental-social justice activists formed the CCSSS. This Committee—created
after (not during) the HHRA process—can be understood as adopting primarily a
reactive role in relation to the main Study. This is not to say that no communityactivist concerns were articulated prior to this point—for example, local mining
union representatives had publicly critiqued the TC’s closed-door meetings, the
conflict of interest of having two mining company representatives on the TC, and the
Study’s lack of attention to specific health risks/exposures of mining employees.5
However, the CCSSS did not formally exist until the HHRA report’s public release.
Strategically appropriating the Study’s name within its own and weaving together
locally salient social, labor, and environmental justice concerns,6 the CCSSS included
representatives from “the [mining] unions, the university and community college,
health care and the environmental community” (CCSSS, 2008).7 Invoking the
procedural and distributive justice issues that inform most environmental justice
initiatives (Haluza-DeLay, O’Riley, Cole, & Agyeman, 2010, p. 8), it described itself as
formed because of “community concerns with the process and findings of the Sudbury
Soils Study Human Health Risk Assessment” (CCSSS, n.d., our emphasis).
In terms of process, the CCSSS (2008) stated its purpose as ensuring “that the
Sudbury community provides their informed consent for the risks to the environment
and human health from historic and current mining and smelter activities, and
determines effective response to those risks” (p.1). It called for the provincial
government to facilitate “a community process to ensure that the Sudbury public
decides what level of risk it can accept, what will be done to clean-up affected
properties, and what will be done to treat those whose health is at risk” (2008, p. 1).
The CCSSS (2008) also foregrounded the “conflict of interest” in having the mining
companies “investigating themselves” (p. 2) and it advocated for the “right” of the
community to obtain “the tools and resources that will allow them to participate
effectively” in the Ecological Risk Assessment process that was still under way (2008,
p. 1). In terms of findings, the CCSSS (2008) critiqued the official assessment for not
considering the potential “synergistic effects of exposure to heavy metals at one time”
and lobbied for further “epidemiological analysis and bio-monitoring” of the
“highest-risk residents” (especially past and current mining workers) along with
blood testing of local children for lead (pp. 1–2).8
As this brief review indicates, both organizations named communication with the
community an important dimension of their process, but how did they each
communicate about community? What meanings and functions did “community”
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have in their versions of the situation? Further, what models of community
participation were implied by and mobilized in these versions? Investigating these
questions not only offers insight into the complex rhetorical-political dynamics of this
situation, but also provides a generative case study for considering similar questions
in other environmental risk communication contexts.
Rhetorical Theory
Rhetorical criticism investigates the situated uses and effects of language (or symbolic
action) by particular human agents, in particular times and places, for particular
purposes. It is an interpretive method of research not aimed at producing broad
generalizations about human communication, but instead concerned with developing
context-specific interpretations of the situated complexities of human symbolic
action, while suggesting potentially fruitful ways of exploring the complexities of
similar—but never identical—communicative situations.
We draw on Burke’s (1966) concept of terministic screens and method of cluster
criticism to trace what “community” means and how it functions in each
organization’s interpretations of the situation. Burke’s metaphor of “terministic
screens” foregrounds the role of language in filtering and shaping what we
understand reality to be. The different terminologies rhetorical actors use to name
the world at once reflect, select, and deflect “reality” (1966, p. 45). Terminologies
constitute filters that direct attention to particular aspects of reality rather than
others, creating different, rhetorically constituted interpretations of the world.
Analyzing terministic screens illuminates the differing motives, values, and assumptions that shape competing worldviews (Gulbrandsen, 2010). Cues to rhetors’
worldviews are available by performing a cluster analysis that charts the important
ingredients of their terministic screens, “noting what follows what” (Burke, 1937/
1984, p. 191). Though most commonly used to trace verbal associations within texts,
cluster criticism also—as Reid (1990) and Goldrick-Jones (2004) have shown—works
well to reveal the meanings and functions of visual rhetorics and of text–image
interactions.
The method involves identifying key terms in the artifact based on either intensity
or frequency (Rueckert, 1963, p. 84) and charting the terms that cluster around or are
associated with these key terms (Foss, 2004, p. 73). As Burke (1957) explains:
the work of every writer … uses ‘associational clusters.’ And you may, by
examining his work, find ‘what goes with what’ in these clusters—what kinds of
acts and images and personalities and situations go with his notions of heroism,
villainy, consolation, despair, etc.” (p. 20)—or, in the case of our analysis, “what
goes” with the notion of “community.”
Because cluster criticism is a generative rather than strictly defined method of
research, associational clusters of related terms may be constructed according to
multiple types of linkage (e.g., grammatical, semantic, thematic, metaphoric,
organizational, argumentative, cultural, and value-based connections) (Burke, 1957,
p. 18; Goldrick-Jones, 1996, pp. 235–236, 2004, pp. 101–102). Our charting of
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“community” attends to words and visualizations that are semantic substitutes for
community and that grammatically or visually characterize community through
modifying words or phrases and elements of visual composition. This mapping of
associational clusters foregrounds tensions and incongruities, as well as resemblances
and compatibilities, within and between each organization’s rhetorics of the places
and people that make up “community.”
What Kind of Place Is (the) Community?
In public communication by both organizations, “community” is integrally associated
with verbal and visual terms that refer to several kinds of places. For the official
Study, this includes clusters that foreground the community’s identity as an
internationally renowned mining center, a geographic area being studied, and an
ecologically healthy and beautiful landscape for residents to enjoy. Similarly, the
CCSSS rhetoric constructs a sense of the community as a mining region, an area of
risk assessment, and a natural landscape; however, it opposes the main Study’s
celebratory version of the region as a paradise-like place characterized by natural
beauty and bounty with a more negative, unappealing view of the region as a place
contaminated by toxic pollution.
Community as paradisal place
Images play a significant role in communicating these senses of place. Take, for
example, the series of four images that dominate the welcome portal of the Sudbury
Soils Study’s website (Figure 1—see supplemental file in online version of article).
Compositionally, the final image of an apparently healthy, active young couple
walking or jogging through a lush park-like area is most significant because of its
vibrancy and color saturation and because it is the only one that appears permanently
on the welcome page; the preceding three images fade in and out every few seconds,
constructing a narrative flow that suggests that the activities represented in the first
three images lead logically to the final, permanent result of the fourth image.
The implied narrative begins with the risk assessment activity of gathering soil
samples (from a seemingly thriving outdoor environment of trees and grass),
followed by an indoor-laboratory analysis of these samples (the white coat, glasses,
and laboratory equipment communicate a reassuring ethos of scientific expertise at
work in the community), with the third step shown as public communication of
information about the study area through a large map. These three stages of the risk
assessment conclude with a final scenic image of the place being assessed, suggesting
through associative logic a harmonious, developmental relationship between the
initial natural beauty of the region, the research activities taking place in the region,
the public’s engaged learning about these activities, and the implied result that the
Study is, somehow, leading to the (re)creation of a beautiful, thriving ecological
environment that fosters human health and enjoyment.
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This visual cluster for “community” is further elaborated within the HHRA
summary report and newsletter (Sudbury Soils Study, 2008; Sudbury Soils Study/
SARA Group, 2008). In one image on the front page of both documents, the place of
the soils study is depicted, in conventional Northern landscape terms, as pristine, vital
nature through a postcard-like photo of rushing water, fall-colored trees, and
glistening rocks (Figure 2—see supplemental file). On the newsletter’s front page, a
prominent, high-angle photograph of a smiling young child, hair gently tousled by
the wind, holding a tin can of blueberries, and framed by a backdrop of green grass
(Figure 3—see supplemental file) complements the leading image of nature-withouthumans. Like the website image of the young couple jogging through lush parkland,
this “smiling child” picture connects human happiness and ecological health by
implying that Sudburians can safely continue to pick and eat the wild blueberries that
grow abundantly in the region. This message conflicts, however, with the pie chart on
the newsletter’s back page, which identifies “local wild blueberries” as a minor but
nonetheless real pathway of lead exposure for toddlers (Figure 4—see supplemental
file). The front-page image here seems to deny or render inconsequential the health
risks communicated by the chart, an incongruity made all the more problematic given
that the Study’s “acceptable” standard of 400 ppm for lead concentrations was double
the provincial norm of 200 ppm.
Primarily, the Study’s images configure “community” as a place of scenic beauty,
happy children, and natural abundance—the negative effects of mining are nowhere
to be seen. Instead, mining is constructed as a source of bounty and prosperity for the
region. In the summary report’s section on “Why was the Sudbury Soils Study
conducted?,” “community” is equated with the region’s identity as a mining center;
this identity is rendered epideictically through appeals to topics of quantity (size and
extent) and quality (status, reputation). For example, the “City of Greater Sudbury” is
characterized as “the nickel capital of the world” enjoying “international recognition.” The honorific cluster continues with phrases foregrounding the positive value
of the mining industry: “benefits of mining,” “rich mineral deposits,” “tremendous
economic and social benefits.” Terminology of geographic and historical extent
reinforces this predominantly qualitative characterization: Sudbury’s mining operations are the “largest on Earth” and have been running for “more than 125 years.”
Visually, the map of Canada adjacent to the text likewise communicates this topic of
extent: the blow-up of the “Study Area” and the “City of Greater Sudbury” takes up
about a third of the total space of the whole Canada map (Figure 5—see
supplemental file). Notably, this map encourages the conflation of the “City” as
mining “capital” and as risk assessment “area”; the use of green, soft yellow, and light
blue to depict the “Study Area” further contributes to its positive imaging, deflecting
attention from its negative identity as a region suffering from mining contamination.
Community as contaminated place
In response to this positive framing of the community as a paradise-like place of
natural beauty and bounty, human health and happiness, and economic-industrial
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greatness, the CCSSS materials construct an opposing view of “the Sudbury basin” as
a contaminated place. Both on its main web page (CCSSS, n.d.) and in the poster for
its “Toxic Trespass” forum (CCSSS, 2009), held approximately six months after the
release of the HHRA results, this sense of place predominates (Figures 6 and 7—see
supplemental file). In the website’s explanation of the Committee’s identity and
purpose, the word “contamination” links with “mining” and “smelters”: mining in
this discourse is the cause of pollution for the community, not the source of
“tremendous social and economic benefits.” This association of community with
contamination is further elaborated in the “Toxic Trespass” forum announcement
(Figure 7—see supplemental file). The event’s main title, “Toxic Trespass,” forcefully
communicates the idea of significant contamination and clearly moralizes the issue:
some actor is guilty of illegitimately or immorally bringing toxicity into the
community’s space. Because this forum attends to “three cities,” not just one
community, the geographic extent of the contamination and the moral depth of the
wrongdoing are compounded. The connection between these communities results
from their shared identity as victims of the “trespass” committed by the mining
companies.
This view of community-as-contaminated-place is further textured by the images
on the CCSSS web page and on the forum’s poster. On the website, the three images
arranged in horizontal sequence below the CCSSS title vividly evoke a polluted
landscape (Figure 6—see supplemental file): the brown earth and unnatural, toxiclooking red stream of sludge in the first photo and the dark, smoke-filled industrial
landscape dominated by mining stacks in the third image oppose the scenic images of
healthy natural landscapes in the official discourse. The CCSSS images appear barren
of both ecological and human life. The central satellite photo with the boundaries of
the study area superimposed resembles mapping images of the study area provided in
the official materials, but its contextual framing among photos of a toxic landscape on
the CCSSS website suggests the problematic extent of the area polluted by mining
rather than, more positively, the extent of the area subject to expert-scientific
assessment.
The image in the top half of the poster (Figure 7—see supplemental file)
reinforces this sense of the community (or communities) as polluted, industrial places
in which human residents and plant life struggle to thrive. The lighted windows of the
houses and the few sprigs of green exist in tension with the dominant smokestacks
and the dark hills that evoke Sudbury’s landscape historically blackened by mining
emissions. The image paints a bleak picture of a city whose residents and nature are
being adversely affected by mining pollution with just a few lights of hope
illuminating the darkness. Unlike the complex appeal-repulsion effects of environmental art that produces what Peeples (2011) calls “the toxic sublime,” the CCSSS
deploys the more straightforward strategy of showing unappealing images of polluted
landscapes to “insert environmental concerns into the public consciousness” (p. 394).
While both organizations draw on the topic of community as geographic area,
they do so in strongly contrasting ways. These contrasting images link closely with
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the contrasting representations of mining’s identification with the community: for
the Sudbury Soils Study, mining has long been and continues to be the source of great
“social and economic” benefits to the community. For the CCSSS, mining represents
a blight on the community, a negative contributor of toxic contamination.
What Kinds of People Make Up (the) Community?
Along with these contrasting senses of community as place, each organization also
configures community in terms of the kinds of people that compose it. For the
Sudbury Soils Study, the people who make up the community are identified
principally as “residents” who are the recipients, in Wynne’s (2008) sense, of public
authority knowledge, both as the “population” modeled in the scientific study and as
the recipients of expert risk information; citizen “input” is limited primarily to the
public’s role in asking information-gathering questions or contributing data for the
study rather than being involved in upstream, deliberative, policy-level discussion
(Sudbury Soils Study, 2008; Sudbury Soils Study/SARA Group, 2008). Conversely, the
CCSSS configures “community” mainly as a group of rhetorical agents who have (or
should have) the right and the power to participate in policy-level decision making
concerning the assessment process and findings; the CCSSS also, though, characterizes local “residents” more passively and reactively as the recipients of
unwarranted health risks and victims of mining contamination who deserve fuller
diagnosis, compensation, and treatment (CCSSS, n.d., 2008, 2009).
Community as objects and sonsumers of scientific assessment
The HHRA newsletter illustrates well the cluster of “community” as the object of
scientific research, intersecting the kinds of place and people that compose it. In this
text, terms such as “residents,” “typical,” “population,” “area,” and “communities
of interest” characterize the community as the location and object of the risk
assessment: in other words, the community is both the “area” in which the study
has occurred and it is the “population” (and “subpopulations”) who reside in this
area and are, therefore, the “human” “receptors” generically modeled in the risk
assessment (Sudbury Soils Study, 2008a).
The sense of community as members of the public who are the recipients of the
scientific information produced through the risk assessment emerges quite clearly in
the “Overview” section of the Sudbury Soils Study (n.d.a) website. Here, invoking the
rhetorically reductive values of transparency and information transmission, the claim
that the study is “An Open Public Process” appears alongside the statement that the
community will be “kept informed” through public communication events and
materials such as “workshops, public open houses, reports, community newsletters,
news releases, and website.” In a somewhat more active capacity, members of the
public are also the “volunteer citizens” who sit on the Public Advisory Committee
(PAC)—though as noted earlier, this Committee had no real decision-making power;
composed of “people who live and work in Sudbury,” the role of the PAC was to
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“help” the TC “address questions and concerns” that the public might have
concerning the Study and, in turn, keep the public “informed” about it. Neither
“residents” and members of the “public” nor “volunteer citizens” are included in the
original list of “stakeholders” that the Study articulated for the risk assessment
process: this term was retained to name the six government–industry representatives
on the TC who were at the same time characterized as the Study’s “community
partners,” thus further rhetorically excluding local citizens from meaningful
involvement in the study’s parameters and process.
Two organizational charts included, respectively, in the HHRA newsletter and the
summary report (Sudbury Soils Study, 2008; Sudbury Soils Study/SARA Group, 2008)
further articulate “community” as a limited, peripheral participant in the risk
assessment process. The inside of the newsletter includes an organizational flowchart
of the study’s process/timeline (Figure 8—see supplemental file) that places the term
“community” only at the bottom, or very end, of the process—despite the emphasis
elsewhere on “public consultation” and “community … participation” throughout
the assessment’s seven-year duration. And at this end point, the “community” is
identified as the recipient of the “results,” not as any kind of active participant in the
process.
A chart of “Who was involved in the Sudbury Soils Study?” in the summary
report likewise shows the position of “community” within the Study’s framing of the
rhetorical situation (Figure 9—see supplemental file). The chart positions “Community” in a relatively minor role as just one of six participating groups surrounding
the “TC” at the center of the process. The dominance of other participants (i.e., the
“SARA Group,”9 the Study’s “Scientific Advisor,” the “Independent Process
Observer,” the “PAC,” as well as the central “TC”) is reinforced visually by their
prominent position in the upper half of the image and their vibrant, visible colors.
Like “Community,” the “Unions” are positioned and colored less prominently but
they are linked only with the “TC” (as if subject to its management), not with
“Community” or with the “PAC.” This version of reality implies that members of the
local mining unions are separate from the community, rather than a significant
component of it. This separation reinforces the Study’s framing of community as
objects of study and consumers of information in contrast to the kind of critical,
deliberative engagement that union representatives sought.
Community as deliberative and biological citizens
The CCSSS counters the main Study’s configuration of the people who make up the
community by drawing on values and claims common within environmental-social
justice discourse. Characterizing itself as responsive to “concerns” about the risk
assessment process that the “Sudbury Public” has, the CCSSS constructs a dual sense
of the Sudbury community that corresponds with the environmental justice goals of
(1) creating more democratic, inclusionary procedures of public consultation and
community involvement in risk contexts and (2) holding public authorities
accountable for providing adequate research, treatment, and compensation to
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“victims” of industry-caused environmental contamination. The CCSSS website, for
example, represents the Sudbury public as having the right of “informed consent”
and the decision-making power to “determine effective response” to the official
Sudbury Soils Study; at the same time, its members are “those whose health might be
affected” and who are entitled to “diagnosis, treatment, and compensation.”
Although both characterizations emerge out of a rights-based discourse, the former
foregrounds the community more as rhetorical agent while the latter emphasizes
more its position as entitled victim.
The CCSSS written response to the HHRA, for instance, evokes the sense of
“community” as comprising citizens willing and able to participate in deliberative
discussion about environmental risks and policy. In this document, “Sudburians” and
the “Sudbury public” are those who are entitled to “real involvement” and
“community engagement” in the “community process” of risk assessment, and they
have the right to be provided with “the tools and resources” to “participate
effectively” in this process. Consonant with environmental justice values, this cluster
is elaborated further through phrases that emphasize the community as decisionmaking agent: “decides … risk it can accept,” “decision,” “acceptable level of risk”
(CCSSS, 2008). Notably, this critique of the official Study occurs, as Wynne (2002)
would argue, according to the dominant scientific-regulatory framing of the problem
as exclusively one of “risk”—and thereby limits citizens to deliberative discussion of
“downstream” impacts, rather than positioning them as capable of participating in
“upstream” knowledge production and policy-making. Nonetheless, the critique
functions as a concerted attempt to counter the Study’s construction of community
members as objects of scientific study and consumers of scientific information.
The CCSSS’s rights-based social justice rhetoric also is enacted in relation to the
situationally salient issue of minority language–cultural rights in Northern Ontario.
The “francophone community,” argues the CCSSS, has the “right to information in
their language” (2008). The importance of francophones as one of the kinds of people
who make up the community is demonstrated by the CCSSS’s equal use of French
and English throughout its public communication materials. This contrasts the
dominance of English in the main Study’s website and publications (despite the
initial, misleading impression communicated on its bilingual home page with its
“English/Français” click options). The CCSSS’s attention to francophone rights
suggests its broader concern, at least in principle, for equitable representation and
inclusion of other marginalized or under-serviced groups in the community, though
the terminology of “right to information” once again implicitly situates citizens as
reactive recipients of public authority knowledge.
Within the CCSSS discourse, the kinds of people who make up “community” also,
importantly, include members of the Committee itself. This identification of the
organization with the community is more explicit than in the official Study’s
discourse. The yoking of the terms “Community,” “Committee,” and “Sudbury Soils
Study” in the organization’s title both stresses the group’s identification with the
community and implies that it, rather than the official Study, truly represents the
Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community”
279
interests of the community in relation to the risk assessment. Claiming to want to
“move … government” to address “public concerns” with the Study, the CCSSS
represents the community not simply as a passive region contaminated by mining but
also as the source of a small group of people (a “Committee”) actively working on
behalf of the larger “public” to address their concerns and thus sharing the
community’s values. And in contrast to the community-as-contaminated-place
cluster, which identified the mining companies as the primary cause of the problem,
this community-committee cluster foregrounds the responsibility of “government” to
develop a solution that adequately addresses “public concerns” (CCSSS, 2008). In this
common environmental justice framing of the situation, community members seek to
hold the state accountable for the well-being of its citizens (Foreman, 1998, p. 65).
The “Toxic Trespass” forum announcement reinforces the Committee’s rhetorically constructed identification with community while also creating a strong
collective sense of community as bringing together multiple locations and groups of
people. The use of first-person plural pronouns (“we,” “our,” “ourselves,” “us”)
combined with terms such as “sharing” and “join” suggest a strong connection
between the Committee and the local public (“Sudburians”), while the sense of
citizens joining together and of identification across groups is most evidently enacted
through the association of “community” with “communities”: this is a “tale of three
cities” or “three communities” which are “our communities.” For “Sudburians,”
according to this announcement, the “forum” provides an opportunity to “learn” and
“understand” from other communities not only about other risk assessment contexts
but also about how to take action in response to the official story, how to “call for
cleanup” (CCSSS, 2009). This framing of the situation resonates with the environmental justice strategies of networking, of learning from each other, of broadening
issues beyond the local (Cox, 2010, p. 273; Pezzullo, 2007, p. 15). As Szasz (1994)
explains, in the 1980s the environmental justice movement gained momentum
because community-based groups “had begun to network, to bring in speakers from
communities fighting the same companies, to share experiences and learn from
others’ tactics” (p. 71).
Primarily, the CCSSS constructs community as deliberative citizens who deserve
to be included in the risk assessment process. However, this construction is
complicated by expanding it to include community as victims of contamination,
connected by their somatic citizenship or “biosociality” (Rose, 2007, p. 134). As the
forum announcement explains, all three communities have “been contaminated” and
“all three were subjects of risk assessment.” The CCSSS’s (2008) written response to
the HHRA similarly identifies members of the community as “current and past
residents,” “the adult population as well as children” who are the victims of “current
and past exposures” and who therefore are entitled to “testing and treatment.” The
language of “population” here recalls terminology from the official Study, but with a
contrasting interpretation: the “population” are the flesh-and-blood residents who—
claims the CCSSS—deserve individual physical testing and treatment, not those who
280
P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed
were abstractly modeled as part of the risk estimation process and found to be
exposed to acceptably low risks from each of the soil contaminants.
In addition to “children” and “communities of concern,” “employees” of the
mining companies are named “the highest risk group of residents” (CCSSS, 2008).
This naming counters the absence of “employees” as one of the types of residents in
the official Study’s version of the situation, as well as the Study’s omission of any link
between “Community” and “Unions” in its organizational map. The CCSSS’s
emphasis on mining workers as perhaps the most important members of the
community demonstrates the intersection of environmental and labor justice values
in the organization’s interpretation of the situation: environment here clearly
includes the places where people “work” as well as where they “live” and “play”
(Proceedings, 1991, p. 103).
As Petryna (2004) has shown, the claiming of a “victim” identity by citizens can
function strategically as a means for securing medical compensation and/or treatment
from the state. Similarly, Rose (2007) argues that “biological senses of identification
and affiliation make certain kinds of ethical demands possible,” including “a demand
for particular protections, for the enactment or cessation of particular policies or
actions, or … access to special resources” (p. 133). These “claims on political
authorities and corporate entities” are made “by those who have suffered biological
damage, in terms of the ‘vital’ rights as citizens” (p. 134). In his view, this enactment
of “biological citizenship” entails significant forms of public dispute, political debate,
and activism (p.136). However, from Wynne’s perspective, this kind of citizenship
can be seen as limiting engagement to a reaction to mainstream scientific risk
knowledge rather than encouraging people to collectivize around a shared concern
with knowledge production and futures building (e.g., imagining and building what
communities could be, in terms not bound and delimited by risk discourses). As the
CCSSS (2009) explains, the forum’s purpose is to discuss “how the risks and impacts
of contamination from metal smelters and refineries are assessed and how
communities call for cleanup.”
Conclusion
Overall, the multiple meanings of community in the Sudbury Soils Study official
discourse reflect and reinforce a set of values consistent with a mainstream regulatory
mode of environmental communication and policy-making. Conversely, the varied
senses of community that emerge from the CCSSS communication materials together
reflect and reinforce a set of values aligned with the rights-based principles and
critical-activist rhetoric of the environmental justice movement. Although both
organizations draw on the common topic of “community” as a key ingredient in their
views of the situation, its particular visual and verbal associations within each group’s
public communication materials enact terministic screens that reflect, select, and
deflect the “reality” of “community” in largely contrasting ways.
These competing views on what kind of place and people make up community
are, however, in important ways mutually constitutive, particularly in the sense that
Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community”
281
the technical-regulatory risk discourse of the official Study frames and fosters the
mainly reactive counter-discourse of the CCSSS. As Agyeman (2005) argues, “much
of the activity of the environmental justice movement … is reactive—that is, focused
on stopping environmental bads as they threaten the community” rather than more
proactively “saying what kind of communities we should be aiming for” (p. 3). His
point is not to criticize environmental justice advocates but instead to foreground
how this limited, downstream form of public participation is “the political reality for
many communities starved of resources” and hence systemically unable to engage on
equitable ground with the “purveyors of environmental bads, such as large
multinationals” who wield “disproportionate influence, economic muscle, and
knowledge” (p. 3).
Consonant with Wynne’s (2005) perspective, our rhetorical analysis of conflicting
ideologies of “community” in this risk assessment context indicates the continuing
presence of authoritative technical-regulatory framings of environmental risk that
largely constrain the rhetorical engagement of citizen groups to a downstream,
reactive response to a phenomenon already problematized, investigated, and
mitigated in terms of “expert” risk constructs. By exploring how conflicting versions
of “community” construct and reinforce this framing, our study contributes a fresh
way of understanding the problems and complexities of public involvement in
environmental policy, suggesting that rhetorical appeals to the ubiquitous value of
“community” may exacerbate rather than resolve tensions between “lay” and
“expert” participants. These conclusions suggest that recent moves toward more
upstream forms of public engagement and community involvement are, at best, still
very limited in their scope. They caution us to continue to be skeptical of institutional
“lip service” to such models and the degree to which such practices may not be
carried out effectively due to political-ideological incommensurability.
However, a rhetorical view of these problems highlights the possibilities for
change as well as the limitations of specific occasions of community involvement.
Because no two rhetorical situations are identical, our brief case study of the rhetoric
of community in one risk assessment context illustrates the value of studying how
“community” is differently constituted in other environmental communication
contexts. As Goldrick-Jones (1996) argues, cluster criticism is a valuable method for
providing insight into the complex, dynamic power relations and conflicts in diverse
sites of controversy and within particular rhetorical communities. As such, cluster
criticism does not simply produce a static map of a predetermined set of values or
motives; it also, suggests Goldrick-Jones, charts “potential transformations of
attitudes or social values” (p. 227).
From a rhetorical perspective, power relations are continuously (re)created
through the symbolic actions of diverse participants in public spheres of environmental communication. Recognizing the power of language to (re)constitute—not
simply reflect—the people and places who make up “community” emphasizes the
centrality of situated rhetorical actions and actors to how power relations are, or may
be, re-configured in specific contexts of risk communication. Attending to localized,
282
P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed
shifting constitutions of “community” in environmental communication—whether
through cluster criticism or other forms of rhetorical analysis—offers a generative
way to better understand, and hence negotiate, the ideological motives and power
dynamics animating those situations. It also suggests the potential to rhetorically
reinvent “community” in ways that foster more productive and less reactive forms of
public engagement than those that occurred in the Sudbury Soils Study.
Notes
1. For example, Depoe et al. (2004); Walker (2007); Simmons (2007); Fisher (2000); Waddell
(1996); Katz and Miller (1996); Irwin (2001, 2009); Wynne (2002, 2005, 2008); Stilgoe and
Wilsdon (2009); Wills-Toker (2004); Hamilton (2003); Kinsella (2004).
2. “Public” and “community” are not, of course, synonymous terms, but in the context of the
Sudbury Soils Study they were frequently closely associated.
3. The separation of the Human Health and Ecological portions of the study—both in time and
substance—is worth noting, particularly in its implications for how “environment” (human vs.
non-human?) was understood by the Study.
4. There was no explanation of how the interests of either the public or the environment were to be
determined.
5. A local union leader argued against the consensus model of decision-making that the Technical
Committee had adopted, claiming that it created the possibility for one or both of the mining
company representatives to veto any decision with which they disagreed—that is, they could
prevent consensus. The critique of the Study’s process by union representatives resulted in them
being permitted to “observe” what had formerly been closed-door meetings among the six
“stakeholders.”
6. See Agyeman (2005) and Gould, Lewis, and Timmons Roberts (2004) on labor–environmental,
or “Blue–Green,” coalitions.
7. The Committee was chaired by a former Sudbury resident-activist who had, several years before,
become the National Coordinator of Mining Watch Canada based out of Ottawa. The
“healthcare” representative was from the Centre de santé communautaire de Sudbury whose
mandate includes advocating for the rights of francophone community members to receive
health services in French.
8. See Corburn (2002) for a discussion of “cumulative exposure assessment” as a response to
environmental justice critiques of the traditional focus on individual contaminants.
9. The SARA (Sudbury Area Risk Assessment) Group was the consortium of consulting firms hired
to conduct the assessment.
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1
Example only
Checkpoint #4 – Theory/Method Component
When studying rhetorical text it is important to note the role of ideologies in it. In a very
simple explanation, ideology can be understood as the worldview of the audience or of the media
source that is portrayed in the artifact (Foss, 2009). According to Sonja Foss (2009), ideology is
“a pattern of beliefs that determines a group’s interpretations of some aspect (s) of the world.
These beliefs reflect a group’s ‘fundamental social, economic, political or cultural interests’” (p.
209). The beliefs held by media sources affect and influence almost everything surrounding the
creation and reception of the artifact. The beliefs held by the media source will be reflected in the
artifact. These beliefs (ideology) are communicated to an audience through the artifact, giving
the audience insight into the world of the media source.
There are numerous factors that can affect the creation of an ideology. One significant
factor is culture. Although many researchers define culture in different ways, V. William
Balthrop (1984) uses Geertz’s description, saying that culture “denotes an historically
transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions
expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” (p. 340). Culture, in essence, is ideology. It is
one window through which men and women view their world. It creates beliefs and opinions
regarding what ideas are true or untrue and determines the ways in which people interact with the
world. According to Balthrop (1984), culture, like ideology, does not simply exist; it is
developed over time until it evolves into a “great perfection” that people view as the authority
regarding the world (p. 341). Culture, therefore, has an incredible affect on the worldview of
people and is a significant element in the creation of ideology and of cultural artifacts.
2
Culture, though influential, is not the only factor that affects the creation of an ideology.
In order for ideology and culture to function – or even exist – Balthrop (1984) argues that myth
must be present. Myth is the essential element that creates ideology and causes the culture to
become a “great perfection.” In a culture, myths are the “ultimate patterns for attributing
significance to human experience, are moralistic and provide guides for action” (p. 341). A
culture’s myths help people understand how to interact with the world by giving them some sort
of rationale for moral or good behavior. The myth provides an explanation of the world, giving
human beings a new understanding of their environment. This understanding through myth
creates culture. Once culture is created, an ideology forms.
The explanation of ideology presented here may make ideology appear to be an obvious
characteristic of most artifacts. Although all artifacts contain some sort of ideology, it is
important to realize that ideology is almost always hidden within the artifact (Foss, 2009). The
beliefs or worldview of a specific group or culture will almost never be easily seen within a
cultural artifact. In order to identify an ideology, researchers must study and examine the artifact
through a careful process of observation and analysis (Foss, 2009). The first step is to identify
the elements of the artifact that may reveal clues about the hidden ideology. These are basic
characteristics of the artifact, known as presented elements (Foss, 2009). Once the presented
elements have been identified, researchers will analyze them, looking for even more clues that
provide a deeper understanding of the ideology. These deeper clues are known as suggested
elements (Foss, 2009). After this step, researchers will categorize the suggested elements in order
to identify the particular ideology that is presented in the artifact. Through this process, the
researcher draws the hidden ideology from the artifact.
3
For this project, I will use Sonja Foss’s method of ideological analysis to study Capcom’s
video game Okami. In my analysis, I will look specifically for certain themes and characteristics
within the game that could express a certain view of the ancient Japanese Shinto religion. Some
possible themes could include the relation of humanity to nature or the relation of humanity to
the deities. Possible characteristics are the portrayal of deities as animals and the use of brushlike graphics in the game. In light of the points made by V. William Balthrop, I will also seek to
understand how these themes and characteristics portray the myths used in the game and what
messages that portrayal communicates regarding the culture created by Japanese Shinto.
4
Works Cited
Foss, S.K. (2009). Chapter 7: Ideological Criticism. In Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and
Practice, 4th ed. (209-220). Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.
Balthrop, V.W. (1984). Culture, Myth, and Ideology as Public Argument: An Interpretation of
the Ascent and Demise of “Southern Culture.” Communication Monographs, 51, 339352. Retrieved February, 25, 2012, from
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