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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how locals in Wyoming County, WV use narrative practices, sensory experiences, health anecdotes, and digital media platforms to document water pollution, address injustice in zones of extraction and sacrifice, and redefine extraction-related water pollution as a form of violence.

Paper long abstract

In April 2025, a risk analysis study revealed what residents of Wyoming County, West Virginia have long known to be true: their drinking water is unsafe, and locals are experiencing water injustice at higher-than-average levels in the US. According to the study, Wyoming County experienced the highest amount of reported water violations by a single-water system in the nation*. Before this study, however, locals had long used narrative practices, sensory experiences, health anecdotes, and digital media platforms to both document this disaster and to raise awareness about the water injustices that many rural, marginalized, and/or low-income communities often face. In West Virginia, intense natural resource extraction (and its associated environmental effects) has been normalized for over a century, often because coal mining has a historic economic and heritage hold on the region. In a political climate where deregulation is on the rise and environmental health and safety policies are declining, what cultural strategies are available to people who live in constant catastrophe, especially when institutions fail to intervene in moments of crisis? This paper examines how Wyoming County locals use oral testimony and experiential encounters with (compromised) nature to redefine extraction-related water pollution as a form of socio-environmental violence. I explore what a cultural focus might offer us in the long battle for water justice in zones of both extraction and sacrifice.

*Cohen, et al. “Mapping risks of water injustice and perceptions of privatized drinking water in the United States: A mixed methods approach.” Risk Analysis, 2025, pp. 1-17.