Megan Poole (she/her/hers)

Assistant Professor of English

University of Louisville

Description of Work

In late 2020, a local councilwoman in West Louisville dealing with air pollution and its detrimental effects on the health of her constituents approached a technical writing scholar to ask: how might information about air pollution and the industries that contribute to this issue be made more accessible to public audiences? Scholars in the rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) have charted paths for answering such a question, examining the role of rhetoric in crafting public policy (Asen, 2010), theorizing the need to conceive of multiple publics in public health (Keränen, 2014), and even more fundamentally, asking what is needed from public writing in the first place (Wells, 1996). Yet what began as the work of promoting public health literacy in plain language (Stableford & Mettger 2007; Grene et al. 2017) has broadened into an extended analysis of Rubbertown, an area of heavy industrial manufacturing plants in West Louisville with a history of toxic leaks, spills, and occasional explosions. Analyzing Rubbertown highlights the need for environmental justice in a city presently coming to terms with its racist history and city-wide injustices. This potential article charts the efforts of an interdisciplinary team of metro council leaders, community activists, and scholars as they 1) attend to the jargon-filled language of public health notices as well as the unsystematic and complex data sources around those notices and 2) fight to “get the listening,” or garner attention, for environmental justice in and around Rubbertown. “Getting the listening,” this team argues, is a step in rhetorical invention not often considered by RHM scholars, but a process that stands to increase the efficacy of RHM scholarship and community-engaged work. This article outlines steps toward a participatory model of listening related to matters of public health, a model in which listening is multi-directional and non-hierarchical.

Contact: megan.poole@louisville.edu | https://www.meganrpoole.com/