Embodied Environmental Risk in Technical Communication

Problems and Solutions Toward Social Sustainability

Samuel Stinson, Mary Le Rouge, Samuel Stinson, Mary Le Rouge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032210582
• eBook ISBN: 9781000548921
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

This collection calls for improved technical communication for the public through an embodied, situated understanding of environmental risk that promotes social justice.

In addition to providing a series of chapters about recent issues on risk communication, this volume offers a diverse look at methodological practices for students, researchers, and practitioners looking to address embodied aspects of crisis and risk that incorporate UX, storytelling, and dynamic text. It includes chapters that bring embodiment to the forefront of risk communication, highlighting the cycle of content creation, dissemination, public response and decision making, continuing iterations of educational efforts, and recovery, toward increasing adaptive capacity as a whole. In addition, this work directs necessary attention to overcoming perceptual difficulties, memory lapses, definitional differences, access issues, and pedagogical problems in the communication of risks to diverse publics.

This collection is essential reading for scholars and can be used as a supplemental text or casebook for courses in technical communication, environmental communication, risk and crisis communication, science communication, and public health.

1 INTRODUCTION

Mary Le Rouge and Samuel Stinson

DOI: 10.4324/9781003266549-1

This edited collection emerged from a confluence of interest developed prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic for the purpose of promoting a greater understanding of risk communication for the public good. Risk communication about mask wearing, social distancing, and “safe” activities during the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic often failed to reach the public and change their behavior toward self-preservation. We were consistently reminded by events during the pandemic that effective risk communication is important and saves lives. While some of the exigence for collecting these chapters on risk communication comes from the COVID-19 pandemic, its true source is the problem of climate change and figuring out how to clearly communicate the risk that global warming poses to the public. Some would even argue that the COVID-19 pandemic was the product of increased human–animal interactions and global interconnectedness through international travel that have made the mutation and spread of the virus more likely. The reduction of natural habitat and increased collocation of human settlement near wild forests made possible by industrialization and necessitated by human population growth has not only adversely impacted animal populations but has also increased incidents of zoonotic disease outbreaks. International travel made possible by technological advances and necessary to conduct transnational business has become an opportunity for COVID-19 to spread widely around the globe. However, we have yet to find a practical way to communicate environmental risk to the public in local contexts, let alone on an international scale, which is a major problem.

What we will argue through this compilation of chapters is that although common problems with stasis, definition, access, and aggregation trouble the public’s reception of technical communication about environmental issues, it is also the lack of focus on human embodiment in the content of technical documents that reduces their functionality. Criticisms so often fall on the format of documents to the exclusion of the “messy” work of untangling the metaphors, symbolism, and basic ideologies that support the knowledge contained within. Technical communicators often work from the assumption that the public is (or should be) on the same page, prizing scientific objectivity over embodied knowledge, but the reverse is often true. People understand the environment primarily through their physical bodies and through metaphors and symbols that reflect this embodiedness.

Embodiment is a concept that was first developed by the 18th-century German aesthetic philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten through aesthetics in the evaluation of art (using the 5 bodily senses, or “sensible cognition,” to account for taste). His work was taken up by Emmanuel Kant, who used Baumgarten’s book Metaphysics (1739) as a textbook during his lectures. Kant focused on methods for effective reasoning and judgment informed by human experience. The idea of embodiment was later more fully developed by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his book the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), who studied how perception affects our understanding of the world. His work was then taken up by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson during the 1980s in a linguistic application of theories of embodied knowledge through metaphors that mirror the body’s parts and movements in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and later, in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999). Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch recommended application of the concept of embodied cognition to many different fields of knowledge, including primarily psychology, in the 1990s with their book The Embodied Mind ([1991] 2016). Since then, embodiment has been studied in rhetoric and technical communication more because of its absence than its presence, especially in the context of risk communication.

For the past 20 years, scholars in technical communications have been studying the difficulties of enacting effective risk and crisis communication policies to address local and global environmental problems such as pandemics, natural and manmade disasters, medical emergencies, and workplace and community dangers (Angeli, 2019; Ding, 2014; Frost, 2013; Potts, 2013; Sauer, 2003; Walker, 2016). Differences exist between embodied experience and abstract representation, separating those at risk from institutional policymakers, which can make effective risk communication more difficult (Sauer, 2003). This is especially true in circumstances in which embodied knowledge is dismissed as unimportant in official documentation of risky environments (Sauer, 2003, pp. 5–6). In addition, different bodies experience different levels of risk, depending on artificial social hierarchies based on race, body shape, gender markers, and the physical marks of socioeconomic differences. By focusing on embodiment (instead of ignoring physical differences out of convenience), it is possible to chart a more realistic view of the determinants of risk for diverse individuals for technical communicators. As Iris Ruiz describes in Race, Rhetoric, & Research Methods (2021):

An embodied rhetorical practice is a praxis that acknowledges this reality for minoritized populations. It is one step closer to performing an antiracist method that relies on decolonial options, such as epistemic delinking, to achieve the goal of antiracist scholarship.

(2021, p. 63)

The objective of this collection is to improve technical communication for the public through an embodied, situated understanding of risk that promotes social justice. We support the continually evolving social justice turn highlighted in the ATTW Series in Technical and Professional Communication’s previous publication by Rebecca Walton, Kristen Moore, and Natasha Jones: Technical Communication After the Social Justice Turn: Building Coalitions for Action (2019). In addition to providing a series of chapters about recent issues on risk communication, this volume offers a diverse look at methodological practices for students, researchers, and practitioners looking to address embodied aspects of crisis and risk both locally and globally that incorporate UX, storytelling, and dynamic text with visuals. We include chapters that bring embodiment to the forefront of risk communication, throughout the cycle of content creation, dissemination, public response and decision-making, continuing iterations of educational efforts, and recovery, toward increasing adaptive capacity as a whole. In addition, we focus on topics such as overcoming perceptual difficulties, memory lapses, definitional differences, access issues, and pedagogical problems in the communication of risks to the public. Here, we review some recent work in technical communication and describe how chapters included in this edited collection work toward bridging this gap between technical communicators and the public.

Chapter Organization

The book is broadly organized into three sections: (I) Representations of the Human Body, (II) Representations of the Earth’s Body, and (III) Representations of Human and Earth Together. The first section engages with representations of the human body as a site of public regulation through technical communication in response to health risks and crises. Chapters in this section include studies of health communication, especially responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The second section deals with representations of the earth’s body and its parts/functions through technical communication. Chapters in this section include research on water management and climate science communication. The earth is seen to hold a state of health and natural abundance or illness, decay, imbalance, or pollution. Systems theory views the planet as a working body of complex, intertwined parts, each affecting the other, as in the Gaia theory. Work in this section entertains notions of geography and spatial/mapping issues, renditions of natural earth cycles and processes, cosmology, and Earth’s place in the universe. The third and final section brings together representations of natural and manmade disasters through technical communication, where both humans and the earth together are experiencing physical hardship and a symbiosis between the two is sought. Chapters in this section include concepts of balance and solutions that work toward synthesis of human/nonhuman ontologies. Relationships between humans and animals and nonhuman entities are investigated as key toward creating synergies. The topics in this edited collection’s sections bring up questions such as: In what ways do representations of the earth’s body, specifically its parts and functions, mirror embodied human lived experience? How can we better understand and communicate about global crises in the context of the human body?

Representations of the Human Body

We have seen in the current COVID-19 pandemic that official government communication about risk filters down to the public and is altered in many ways by the media and through unofficial interpersonal communication on social media. Huiling Ding’s use of the term transcultural to denote a difference in culture between the ruling class and the public does offer some explanation for the incommensurability in communication about the epidemic in China. And this theoretical construct, when applied to communication failures about the risk of COVID-19 in the United States, works to highlight moments when conflicting reports about the efficacy of mask wearing, hand washing, and social distancing caused mass-spreader events. But we argue that by naming the cultural difference between official and public communication about the disease as embodied and attending to the physical experience of the public adds a deeper understanding of where that communication failed and why.

Huiling Ding uses the theoretical framework of transcultural professional communication to study the rhetoric surrounding the SARS epidemic in China (Ding, 2014, p. 21). She takes up Arjun Appadurai’s five areas of global textuality: ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, financescape, and ideascape to study transcultural communication about the global epidemic (Ding, 2014, p. 22). She describes her research as using a “critical contextualized methodology” that provides “a theoretically informed framework both to examine transcultural rhetorics and to explore ways for participation and social intervention in global events” (Ding, 2014, p. 29). Ding seeks out and analyzes transformational moments in international events, tipping points that will reflect power relations in China and other countries that were threatened by the epidemic.

Her study is unique in that it focuses on events in a non-Western country and compares that with Western ways of dealing with SARS. It also stands out as the only book-length study in the field of technical communication that describes an epidemic.

Ding has also studied transcultural communication about HIV/AIDS and H1N1 comparatively between the United States and China (Ding, 2013, 2014). There are other studies of yellow fever and H1N1 and swine flu that focus on disease mapping and metaphors found in electronic media, respectively (Angeli, 2012; Welhausen, 2015). What these studies have brought to the table is a corpus of information regarding communication about epidemics that shows how social context in communication tactics and epistemology affects audience understandings of risk and their ability to participate in decision-making and self-protection strategies. According to Angeli, “The way in which pandemic flu is framed affects how millions of people understand and act on health concerns, thus affecting the public’s medical decisions…” (Angeli, 2012, p. 219). Her disambiguation of the role of metaphor in constructing the public’s understanding of disease is akin to how Ding describes the role of folklore in the circulation of information through the public when official communication sought to deny the reality of the epidemic.

Ding’s book is partly focused on the environmental determinants of risk for becoming infected: geographical factors of country/city and the location/construction of medical facilities. It also speaks to the power relations between government rhetoric that initially sought to deny the problem and on-the-ground public deliberation of those who saw friends and family becoming sick. Therefore, although a critical assessment of Chinese medical rhetoric about epidemiology and disease risk factors is included in her study, Ding shows that it is altogether affected by the strong arm of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• I Representations of the Human Body
• II Representations of the Earth’s Body
• III Representations of Human Beings and Earth Together
• Index