1. Vernacular waterscapes: a study of the 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia through the analytical lenses of folklore and feminist geography
Bethani Turley
MA Student, Geology and Geography Department
West Virginia University

2. Introduction
In January 2014, 300,000 West Virginia resident’s drinking water contaminated by coal cleaning chemical MCHM.
The days following the chemical spill included incomplete and contradictory warnings from the government. (Bryson, 2015, pp. 343– 344)

3. Introduction
Original project: Understanding the lived experience of the chemical spill in West Virginia.
Current project: Exploring the gendered embodied experience of the spill in West Virginia focusing on water and toxicity.

4. Conceptual Framework
Vernacular risk perception -- E.g. a state agency may communicate “a single ‘objective’ form of risk”, “leaving locally defined concerns out of the picture” (Goldstein, 2004, p )
Feminist geography and embodied knowledge – role of emotions and the body (Knoblauch, 2012, p. 54), critiques the idea that the emotions and the body are irrational (Young, 1994)
Vernacular risk perception manifests as embodied knowledge

5. What are the locally defined concerns?

6. I was getting sick that was the other thing is I thought I was coming down with the flu for about a week before they announced the leak. My sister’s a registered nurse and my mother in law at the time is a registered nurse and I called them and I was like, every time I’d stand up I’d get dizzy. I took a pregnancy test, I thought I might be pregnant. I was like, I don’t know what, why I feel just kind of ick. Like I should be getting sick any day, just kind of run down. Then I found out I’d been drinking poison. And bathing in it, and cooking with it. -- E, interview on June 13, 2016

7. B: Could you smell it?
That day, what had happened was it was a gradual leak then it just overwhelmed the system. That day and probably the following two or three days, yeah. The whole town smelled like black licorice. You walk outside there was this black licorice smell. A lot of people criticized us early on and said why would you drink it if you could smell that – you couldn’t. It was such small levels at first that you couldn’t taste it or smell it, but then once it permeated the entire system it was very very obvious and we’re basically 300 thousand guinea pigs. -- E, interview on June 13, 2016

8. Before the chemical leak, there were documented, an umbilical cord has three veins in the cord, a healthy one. And in Charleston and in the chemical valley they’ve been seeing live births with two vein umbilical cords. Which is an adaptation, a mutation, basically to say, we can’t live here. We can’t reproduce. It’s the biology saying we’re changing how we reproduce to make it less likely we can reproduce because the environment is toxic. Very scary. You won’t see that anywhere, that’s just anecdotally through nurse practitioners who practice there and do live births and deliveries. The water crisis brought a lot of people to the table. -- E, interview on June 13, 2016

9. Analysis
Bodily validation: embodied knowledge coming before official knowledge, before smell
Spill as a crisis that brought up pre-existing toxic conditions
Part of larger discourse about progress of industry is Appalachia
Rethinking place, environment, and the body
Not meant to set up a dichotomy between scientific and embodied knowledge, or to create generalized ideas about women in risk situations

10. Conclusions
Current project: Exploring the gendered embodied experience of the spill in West Virginia
Vernacular risk perception is understood through embodied knowledge
Narrative of bodily changes challenges geographic conceptualization of the environment, critiquing ideas about place as a setting outside of a non-porous body (Mansfield & Guthman, 2012)

11. References
Bryson, K. L. (2015). A Regional Rhetoric for Advocacy in Appalachia. The Ohio State University.
Goldstein, D. E. (2004). Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Jensen, S. Q., & Elg, C. (2010). Intersectionality as embodiment. Kvinder, Kon & Forskning, (2), 30– 39.
Knoblauch, A. A. (2012). Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions, Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy. Composition Studies, 402, 50–65.
Mansfield, B., & Guthman, J. (2012). The implications of environmental epigenetics: A new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations. Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 486–504.
Sundberg, J. (2005). Looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the emergence of critical geographies of Latin America. Geoforum, 36(1 SPEC. ISS.), 17–
Young, K. (1994). Whose Body? An Introduction to Bodylore. The Journal of American Folklore, 107(423), 3–8.