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Mapping Vicarious Proximity: Holistic and Dualistic Metaphors in a Mountain Valley Pipeline Public Hearing

ABSTRACT This article applies Justin Mando’s 2016 coding scheme for vicarious proximity to a corpus of citizen comments at a public hearing about the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), a 303-mile natural gas pipeline that is planned to cut across sections of West Virginia and Virginia. This analysis reveals that vicarious proximity appeals map overwhelmingly onto the public hearing comments, further establishing a theory of vicarious proximity that can be used as a way to understand how people use place-based appeals to speak about contested environmental projects. An additional finding of metaphors, categorized as holistic and dualistic, was revealed in the analysis and extends our understanding of vicarious proximity by elucidating the ideologies, value systems, and cultural influences that inform citizens’ relationship to place. Based on these findings, this article argues for future investigation of vicarious proximity to include an attention to holistic and dualistic metaphors that determine how, or if, they extend our understanding of vicarious proximity as they did in the MVP public hearing.