By working directly in Superfund communities, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is embedded within a complex tapestry of federal and state agencies, local government entities, and other organizations that community stakeholders encounter regularly. The diversity of statutory obligations and expertise among these organizations, particularly as they relate to stakeholders’ health concerns, presents challenges for creating shared understanding between agencies and the communities they serve. Thus, addressing key elements of individual sensemaking during engagement activities is essential for those who work in communities.

Because sensemaking helps individuals determine the seriousness of a situation, decide how to react to the situation, and interpret the situation after it has changed, the process affects every level of environmental risk communication, from assessment through response through post-crisis learning and back through assessment again. Central concepts are the adoption, maintenance, and breakdown of role structures. Highly contextual in nature, the sensemaking process is rooted in the impact that past experience has on the conceptualization of the possible, creating an inherently retrospective exercise.

Individuals play out prescribed roles to maintain familiar structures. When situations threaten these roles, the structures can disintegrate, leading to a loss of order and direction (Weick, 1995). As role frameworks deteriorate, a cascading effect occurs in which meaning is lost, causing additional deterioration of role frameworks, which leads to further loss of meaning and generates serious repercussions for relational stability (Bryant and Miron, 2004). Relational deterioration can further decrease the stability of role frameworks already made fragile by past crisis, such as contamination that results in a Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) designation. As Blumer (1966) states, “In the flow of group life there are innumerable points at which the participants are redefining each other's acts. Such redefinition is very common in adversary relations, it is frequent in group discussion, and it is essentially intrinsic to dealing with problems” (p. 538).

Drawing from case study evidence generated around the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant NPL site, this presentation will address the ways in which basic sensemaking processes, and particularly role definitions, play into public understandings of ATSDR specifically and, more broadly, “the government” -- a term that is often used nonspecifically to encapsulate the activities of all agencies engaged in site activities. Data derived from interviews, focus groups, and media content analysis will be contextualized within risk communication and organizational sensemaking theory to illustrate specific relational and trust challenges that have arisen through misunderstandings of agency functions and subsequent interactions. The implications of such role blurring for practitioners in the field, as well as potential mechanisms for minimizing role confusion, will also be discussed.