K2: Do No Harm: Medical Professionals’ Experiences at the Climate-Health Nexus

The medical community has undertaken various activities central to the questions and contexts of the Conference on Communication and Environment’s praxis-orientation, yet such work has been largely absent from environmental communication scholarship. This practitioner roundtable discussion engages the health-environment nexus by compiling different narrative experiences of medical professionals, who will discuss their environmental and climate action work in pedagogical, community, and organizational contexts. Practicing physicians will each briefly offer their experiences with curricular practices, community issues, patient interactions, and/or environment-health organizational initiatives, followed by a facilitated Q&A session. 

In sharing the many voices of the panel with the lived experiences, scholarship, and insights of COCE participants, the primary aim of the panel is to initiate narrational zones of contact. Medical professionals, working at the intersection of technical knowledge and embodied experiences of bodies in pain, can function as nodal points for responding to environment-health issues and, as such, have much to offer the field of environmental communication, rhetorics of toxins, and praxis-oriented work. Further, an audience of communication scholars and practitioners can offer back to medical professionals engaged in this work. In particular, beyond deficit models of public interactions, communication scholarship can offer the medical field a richer understanding of communicative action.