Constructing the vicarious experience of proximity in a Marcellus Shale public hearing

ABSTRACT

This paper examines citizen testimony in a public hearing held within the Marcellus Shale region, USA. By focusing on the role of place as an argumentative resource, this analysis reveals an appeal common to both sides of the issue where hearing participants use their knowledge of a place to provide the audience with the vicarious experience of being in that place. Such scene-making not only provides credibility to average citizens, it is also used to negotiate the communal meaning of place. In this negotiation, fracking supporters are found to be less descriptive and provide an “aerial view” of the places they thematize while fracking opponents represent scenes more closely from an “on-the-ground” perspective with a high level of detail. This difference affects how audience members are invited to engage with these scenes, which may impact the acceptance and circulation of these arguments as well as the way people experience the place they live.

KEYWORDS:

• Hydrofracking
• proximity
• discourse analysis
• rhetoric
• ordinary democracy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as Guest Editors Richard Buttny and Andrea M. Feldpausch-Parker for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts of this paper. The author also thanks David Kaufer, Barbara Johnstone and Linda Flower for their guidance on this project and Doug Phillips for his help editing the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Justin Mando http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8392-4337

Notes

1. I also viewed partial video of the hearing to gauge accuracy of the transcript and to better understand the context of the hearing. I chose to base my analysis solely on the transcript as I sought to understand larger rhetorical features of the speeches rather than focus on potential insights gained from features of oral discourse.

2. Bierwisch admits that within the intrinsically spatial there are degrees such as bird and parrot.

3. Yilit is an outlier to the aerial perspective that is common among pro-frackers. However, Yilit does jump from scene to scene in his account, relocating his audience's focus from his family's farm to his job site “sitting on the iron.”

4. All vicarious proximity appeals present a scene for the audience to visualize. The variable invitation to visualize emphasizes the invitation and is reserved for instances where speakers explicitly prompt an audience's imagination. This is accomplished by using an imperative statement (e.g. “Close your eyes and imagine … ”) or with a prompt that signals the beginning of a narrative (e.g. “I'm going to tell you a story about my neighborhood”).