Citizen Discourse on Contaminated Water, Superfund Cleanups, and ...

economic, and cultural theory capture little in terms of the “in place” interpretations and negotiations that articulate a “place to know.”

As noted by Mugerauer (1995), no one sense of place functions as essential. Rather, as individuals and collectives respond to landscapes, they borrow from and contribute to the available meanings used to define the place. Thus, places are polysemous; they are defined by multiple meanings. Again, dwelling requires living in place. Thus, to be both “within culture” and “at home,” one must articulate between the abstractions of landscape and the particulars of the places we know. If place meanings are polysemous and dialogic, then they together constitute a larger landscape discourse. It is here, then, that our attentions turn towards understanding the discourses of place.

Discourses that Define Places

Among cultural geographers, it has long been recognized that interpretations of places are symbolic and polysemous (Duncan, 1973), that landscape ideas are caught in linguistic nets (Tuan, 1991), and that there are collective contributions to resulting discourses (Domosh, 1987). Fruitful discourse analysis can take shape as “a fine-grained, descriptive analysis of specific utterances, and [as] a focus on larger scale abstractions” that often uses critical lenses (Scollo, in press). Researchers employing fine-grained analyses often focus on particular discursive elements, such as evolving discussions of sustainability. They also often examine the way discourses change over time or within a particular community by focusing on conflicting or contested discourses, such as that of development versus sprawl. At larger scales, discourse analyses examine how public, political, or dominant ways of speaking represent and reinforce social power.

One particular type of fine-grained descriptive analysis has been referred to as cultural discourse analysis. This type of analysis is able to examine distinctive communicative forms, norms, and rules for action in order to learn more about codified meanings (Scollo, in press; Carbaugh, 2007; Carbaugh, Gibson, & Milburn, 1997). For instance, fine-grained