“You smell sulfur in the sky”: embodied knowledge, smell, and expertise

Pittsburgh consistently ranks as one of the worst U.S. cities for air pollution. This article analyzes qualitative, semi-structured interviews with thirty-three participants throughout the Greater Pittsburgh Area to examine how people express what they are feeling in their bodies when exposed to pollution. Analyzing these data with an affective and materialist lens, I illustrate how participants identify smell as a sign of uncertainty and try to gain certainty through community agreement and/or empirical data. In accounting for a pollution-related stench, participants drew upon smell as a powerful rhetorical force that produces and circulates meaning through bodies. Ultimately, I argue that smell, and the uncertainties it can raise, shapes how people make sense of the world around them and becomes a rallying point for describing the sensations and feelings of living in a polluted environment. Thus, smell is an important factor for how people create and circulate meaning. This article highlights how everyday people, especially those who are underrepresented and marginalized, make sense of environmental violence in and through their bodies. Rhetoricians, politicians, and scientists alike should account for these forms of olfactory persuasion as they seek to understand the effects of environmental pollution.