Center for Environmental Communication Studies reshapes Cincinnati department

Every so often an opportunity comes along to reshape an entire program and to create something fresh in the process. Such an opportunity has been showing itself over the past few years in the University of Cincinnati's communication department.

Faced with a significant cohort of faculty who were nearing retirement, department chair Gail Fairhurst and colleagues knew that as replacements were hired over the years there would be an opportunity to move in new directions. Her assistant chair Stephen Depoe had become interested in the emerging areas of environmental and risk communication, and his work had been showing the potential for funding. The university had also been moving toward emphasizing its health-oriented programs and had created HERI, the Health and Environmental Risk Institute. To take advantage of these opportunities, Depoe formed the Center for Environmental Communication Studies in 1994.

The center's presence was boosted by the presence of a major toxic waste site, at the nearby Fernald nuclear weapons installation. According to Fairhurst, Fernald was a "living museum" of what might be required in the clean-up process: Employee cancer rates were extremely high, and employees had already won a $20 million law suit with another $60 million pending. A company called FERMCO, the Fernald Environmental Restoration Management Corporation, had been formed to clean up the site, and the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency were funding a fair amount of activities associated with the clean-up.

The center was able to connect with FERMCO in two ways. First, the center helped FERMCO establish an "envoy program," which trained Fernald employees to act as liaisons between the company and members of the surrounding community during the clean-up process. The project was recently evaluated by Jerry Jordan, an assistant professor in the communication department, along with colleagues and students. Second, faculty and students conducted a communication audit of FERMCO, and out of that audit came a series of training programs in public affairs and management that were conducted by communication department faculty. This ongoing relationship has netted the center a total of $400,000 in supported projects to date.

In the works are an oral history project that will attempt to "record and preserve the social, cultural, and political history of the community surrounding the Fernald, DOE site," according to Depoe. The center's staff also plan to work directly on developing communication skills of environmental activists in the community through facilitating meetings, conducting informal mediation, sponsoring street fair exhibits and organizing clean-up events.

The establishment of the center has also served as a catalyst for other faculty research and for graduate study. For example, Kurt Neuwirth, an assistant professor in the Cincinnati department, has been studying the public's understanding of messages about the risks associated with consumption of fish from the Great Lakes, a project he hopes will lead to the design of effective "fish advisory" messages. The department faculty have also revised their graduate program so that master's students can specialize in environmental communication during their second year of coursework, and a number of the department's students have participated in the center's projects.

Getting such a busy center started has not been easy. Depoe and colleagues have been helped by making connections with faculty in other departments and including them in the center's projects. Currently, faculty from law, political science, engineering, and environmental health are participating in the center's work and Depoe has found that the team approach has been an effective one. Still, obtaining resources from the university has been difficult, since expectations for the communication department have until now not included the kind of facility-dependent research that now exists.

Still, through the hard work of Depoe, Fairhurst, and other communication faculty at Cincinnati, the Center for Environmental Communication Studies has become both a major "player" on the campus and a strategic means for rethinking a department's program.