Emotion and othering in a contaminated community

Abstract

This article focuses on community responses to residential toxic exposure in eastern Sandusky County, Ohio, where 35 children were diagnosed with or died of cancers of the brain and central nervous system between 1996 and 2010. I turn to emotion—an often presupposed mechanism of power—to examine how risk discourses and strategies reproduce inequalities. Analysis of interviews and archival documents shows how emotional responses are not only implicated in residents’ community identity, but also how emotion works to suppress the emergence of collective action. Emotions including fear, confusion, guilt, powerlessness, and apathy contribute to how a contaminated community, in spite of awareness of risk, minimizes threat to support the continuity of their life pattern. I address the mechanisms of shaming and “othering” of community members who challenge the status quo while emotion—as read from a cultural framework—facilitates adaptation to risk.