The Social Life of Pollution: How Social Narratives Shape Pollution Perceptions and Meaning Making in Chicago, Illinois

In this thesis, I excavate the various social processes that shape Chicagoans' perception and meaning making about environmental pollution in Chicago, Illinois. Drawing upon in-depth ethnographic interview data from 19 participants living in Chicago, I uncover three main social processes that invoke various amounts of significance for Chicagoans' pollution experiences; which I define as naturalization, contextualization, and reflection. Utilizing grounded theory methodology, my project constructs a theory of experiential and somatic knowledge production that adds to the literature of environmental social scholars to better conceptualize pollution knowledge and perception. Ultimately, I argue that pollution experiences are imbued with significance or insignificance for Chicagoans and are shaped by social narratives. Pollution experiences gain significance for Chicagoans when they lie outside of what is socially determined to be natural within a social and spatial context. These social and spatial contexts also frame pollution experiences and provide relative comparisons. Reflection works to uncover the significance of pollution encounters that otherwise would remain less significant. Each of these processes have implications for organized action to address polluters.