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For this checkpoint, you should choose one of the theoretical approaches you have read about for analyzing rhetoric in the Foss book. Additionally, you should read at least ONE additional scholarly article about this method of analysis. In an approximately 3 pages paper, you should summarize the theory, highlighting the key theoretical assumptions and explain how you use them as a method of analysis. Your summary should include references to both the course text AND this article. Then you should explain how you are going to use this method to analyze your text. You SHOULD NOT include your actual analysis here. Please see the following sample Ideological Criticism theory/method section to guide your writing.

HINT: Check the end of your chapter for potential articles.

For your paper, you should:

a) summarize the key components of the theory/method (properly citing all sources), AND

b) discuss how you plan to (or already have) analyzed your text for your final project (you may want to draw on Checkpoint #1 for this part of the assignment).

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hello buddy these are the direction to do this paper. the chapter or the method that i will be using is the cluster method and is is part of large homework, so we are building it part by part.

Please use the chapter for the cluster method and the artifact that i used to analyze if the Obama's 2004 DNC keynote speech.


i am also attaching example that would help you. Please use the same format. and i am attaching the article that you will need to use with the book as a resources for this paper .


Please Use both the article and the book in this paper as resources.

if you have any question, let me know

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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 268 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed 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). 270 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed 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 Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 271 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” 272 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed 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 Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 273 “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. 274 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed 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 Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 275 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 276 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed 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 Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 277 “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 278 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed “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. References Agyeman, J. (2005). Sustainable communities and the challenge of environmental justice. New York: New York University Press. Burke, K. (1937/1984). Attitudes toward history. Berkeley: University of California Press. Burke, K. (1957). The philosophy of literary form: Studies in symbolic action. New York: Vintage. Burke, K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature and method. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cantrill, J. G. (1998). The environmental self and a sense of place: Communication foundations for regional ecosystem management. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 26, 301–318. doi:10.1080/00909889809365509 Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 283 Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study (CCSSS). (2008). Open submission to the SARA group regarding the Human Health Risk Assessment. Retrieved from http://www.web.ca/∼ nwatch/SudburySoils/CommitteesubmissionOctober31.doc Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study (CCSSS). (2009). Announcement for “Toxic Trespass” forum. Retrieved from http://www.web.ca/∼nwatch/SudburySoils/February28_ event.html Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study (CCSSS). (n.d.). Homepage. Retrieved from http://www.web.ca/∼nwatch/SudburySoils/sudburysoils.html Corburn, J. (2002). Environmental justice, local knowledge, and risk: The discourse of a community-based cumulative exposure assessment. Environmental Management, 29, 451–466. doi:10.1007/s00267-001-0013-3 Cox, R. (2010). Environmental communication and the public sphere (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Depoe, S., Delicath, J. W., & Elsenbeer, M. F. A. (Eds.). (2004). Communication and public participation in environmental decision-making. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Fisher, F. (2000). Citizens, experts, and the environment: The politics of local knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foreman, C. H. (1998). The promise and peril of environmental justice. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Foss, S. K. (2004). Rhetorical criticism. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press. Goldrick-Jones, A. (1996). Men in a feminist forum: A rhetorical analysis of the White Ribbon Campaign against male violence (PhD thesis). Troy, NY: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Goldrick-Jones, A. (2004). The ribbon and the rose: Visual rhetorics against violence to women. Ethnologies, 26(1), 95–123. doi:10.7202/013342ar Gould, K. A., Lewis, T. L., & Timmons Roberts, J. (2004). Blue-green coalitions: Constraints and possibilities in the post 9–11 political environment. Journal of World-Systems Research, X, 91–116. Gulbrandsen, K. (2010, October). Articulating the rhetorical situation: The terms of technology transfer. Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication, Chicago, IL. Retrieved from http://businesscommunication.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2011/04/ABC-2010-11.pdf Haluza-DeLay, R., O’Riley, P., Cole, P., & Agyeman, J. (2010). Introduction: Speaking for ourselves, speaking together: Environmental justice in Canada. In J. Agyeman, P. Cole, & R. HaluzaDelay (Eds.), Speaking for ourselves: Environmental justice in Canada (pp. 1–22). Vancouver: UBC Press. Hamilton, J. D. (2003). Exploring technical and cultural appeals in strategic risk communication: The Fernald radium case. Risk Analysis, 23, 291–302. doi:10.1111/1539-6924.00309 Herndl, C., & Brown, S. C. (1996). Introduction. In C. Herndl & S.C. Brown (Eds.), Green culture: Environmental rhetoric in contemporary America (pp. 3–20). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Infrastructure Canada. (2005). Planning for a soft landing: Non-renewable resource development and community infrastructure in the Northwest Territories. Retrieved from http://www.maca.gov. nt.ca/resources/INFC_Paper_plan_for_soft_landing(Nov10).pdf Irwin, A. (2001). Constructing the scientific citizen: Science and democracy in the biosciences. Public Understanding of Science, 10(1), 1–18. doi:10.1088/0963-6625/10/1/301 Irwin, A. (2009). Moving forwards or moving in circles? Science communication and scientific governance in an age of innovation. In R. Holliman, E. Whitelegg, E. Scanlon, S. Smidt, & J. Thomas (Eds.), Investigating science communication in the information age: Implications for public engagement and popular media (pp. 3–17). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, S. B., & Miller, C. (1996). The low-level radioactive waste siting controversy in North Carolina: Toward a rhetorical model of risk communication. In C. G. Herndl & S. C. Brown 284 P. Spoel and R. C. Den Hoed (Eds.), Green culture: Environmental rhetoric in contemporary America (pp. 111–140). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Kinsella, W. (2004). Public expertise: A foundation for citizen participation in energy and environmental decisions. In S. Depoe, J. Delicath, & M. A. Elsenbeer (Eds.), Communication and public participation in environmental decision-making (pp. 83–95). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ontario Ministry of the Environment (2003). Backgrounder: Sudbury soils study. Retrieved from http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/envision/sudbury/soilsstudybg.htm Paehlke, R. (2009). The environmental movement in Canada. In D. VanNijnatten & R. Boardman (Eds.), Canadian environmental policy and politics (3rd ed.; pp. 2–13). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peeples, J. (2011). Toxic sublime: Imaging contaminated landscapes. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 5, 373–392. doi:10.1080/17524032.2011.616516 Petryna, A. (2004). Biological citizenship: The science and politics of Chernobyl-exposed populations. Osiris, 19, 250–265. doi:10.1086/649405 Pezzullo, P. (2007). Toxic tourism: Rhetorics of pollution, travel, and environmental justice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Proceedings: The first National People of Color environmental leadership summit, Washington, DC. (1991, October). Distributed by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. Reid, K. (1990). The Hay-Wain: Cluster analysis in visual communication. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 14(2), 40–54. doi:10.1177/019685999001400203 Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rueckert, W. H. (1963). Kenneth Burke and the drama of human relations. Berkeley: University of California Press. Simmons, M.W. (2007). Participation and power: Civic discourse in environmental policy decisions. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Spoel, P., & Barriault, C. (2011). Risk knowledge and risk communication: The rhetorical challenge of public dialogue. In D. Starke-Meyerring, A. Paré, N. Artemeva, M. Horne, & L. Yousoubova (Eds.), Writing (in) the Knowledge Society (pp. 87–112). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Stilgoe, J., & Wilsdon, J. (2009). The new politics of public engagement with science. In R. Holliman, E. Whitelegg, E. Scanlon, S. Smidt, & J. Thomas (Eds.), Investigating science communication in the information age: Implications for public engagement and popular media (pp. 18–34). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sudbury Soils Study. (n.d.a) Overview. Retrieved from http://www.sudburysoilsstudy.com/EN/ overview/whystudy.asp Sudbury Soils Study. (n.d.b). Web page. Retrieved from http://www.sudburysoilsstudy.com/EN/ indexE.htm Sudbury Soils Study. (2008). Human health risk assessment results newsletter. Retrieved from http:// www.sudburysoilsstudy.com/EN/overview/reports/FINAL_SSS_HHRA_Results_Newsletter_ENG.pdf Sudbury Soils Study/SARA Group. (2008). Summary of volume II: Human health risk assessment. Retrieved from http://www.sudburysoilsstudy.com/EN/media/Volume_II/Volume_II_SummaryReport/FINAL_SARA_HHRA_Summary_May01_08.pdf Szasz, A. (1994). EcoPopulism: Toxic waste and the movement for environmental justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Waddell, C. (1996). Saving the great lakes: Public participation in environmental policy. In C. Herndl & S. Brown (Eds.), Green culture: Environmental rhetoric in contemporary America (pp. 141–165). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” 285 Walker, G. B. (2007). Public participation as participatory communication in environmental policy decision-making: From concepts to structured conversations. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, 1, 99–110. doi:10.1080/17524030701334342 Wills-Toker, C. (2004). Public participation or stakeholder frustration: An analysis of consensusbased participation in the Georgia Ports Authority’s Stakeholder Evaluation Group. In S. Depoe, J. Delicath, & M. A. Elsenbeer (Eds.), Communication and public participation in environmental decision-making (pp. 175–199). Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Wynne, B. (2002). Risk and environment as legitimatory discourses of technology: Reflexivity inside out? Current Sociology, 50, 459–477. doi:10.1177/0011392102050003010 Wynne, B. (2005). Risk as globalizing “democratic” discourse? Framing subjects and citizens. In M. Leach, I. Scoones, & B. Wynne (Eds.), Science and citizens: Globalization and the challenge of engagement (pp. 66–82). London: Zed Books. Wynne, B. (2008). Elephants in the room where publics encounter “science”?: A response to Darrin Durant, “Accounting for expertise: Wynne and the autonomy of the lay public.” Public Understanding of Science, 17, 21–33. doi:10.1177/0963662507085162 Copyright of Environmental Communication is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. 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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 http://ezproxy.dom.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db =ufh&AN=9212101&site=ehost-live&scope=site
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