Beyond Consensus
How Everyday Citizens Advocate for Local Environmental Issues
Beyond Consensus
How Everyday Citizens Advocate for Local Environmental Issues
Description
By better understanding the "genre" of environmental public hearings, one can challenge ideas of effectiveness and consensus so that citizens can learn to advocate more effectively for their concerns about environmental issues.
This book addresses how public hearing genre conventions are established and how those conventions inform and often govern tensions that arise in public discourse about a contested environmental project. The two questions driving the author's inquiry are: one, how do citizens and institutions interpret, prepare for, respond to, and engage with the public hearing genre? And two, what role and effect do public hearings have on both the community and the contested project's overall process? The case study delves into public comments from two Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) 401 Water Quality Certification public hearings that were held in August 2017 and hosted by Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ). The author argues that there are ways we might reimagine ideas of effectiveness, consensus, and the public hearing genre, specifically in the case of the 401 Public Hearings and more generally in other public hearings where public discourses center on a contested environmental project like the MVP.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
About the Author
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Mountain Valley Pipeline and the 401 Public Hearings
1. Using Genre theory to Understand the MVP 401 Public Hearings
2. Understanding the Problem and Genre Set of the MVP 401 Public Hearings
3. Genre Theory and the Public Sphere: The Reciprocal Relationship between the MVP Publics and the 401 Public Hearings
4. Protests at the 401 Public Hearings
Conclusion: Findings, Limitations, and Moving Forward
Bibliography
Product details
| Published | Jan 08 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 152 |
| ISBN | 9781978766303 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 4 b/w illus |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Reviews
ONLINE RESOURCES
Bloomsbury Collections
This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.
Related Titles
