Contamination and Redemption Sequences in Narratives of Environmental Suffering

Abstract

Redemption and contamination sequences are narrative patterns that derive meaning from events. Environmental trauma narratives involving pollution exhibit such qualities in a literal and figurative sense. This study focuses on how and how often these types of sequences appear in accounts of environmental trauma from an expert group perspective and the perspective of community members who have experienced the pollution. For this study transcript data from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Oral History Project were used. 18 transcripts were used consisting of nine from the expert group and nine from the community member group. Further research is needed to establish the relationship between identity and frequency of sequences in the rhetoric of each group.