Emma Childress

Fulbright University of Bristol Summer Institute

Emma Childress is a third-year student at Western Kentucky University from Elizabethtown, Kentucky. She is a first-generation college student double majoring in English and Environmental, Sustainability and Geographic Studies. Her research interests focus on how to make environmental science communication and public education more engaging through effective, creative, and art-based information.

With WKU Faculty member, Dr. Jessi Thomsen, Childress has been working on a research project to develop a framework of sustainable language through analysing the rhetorical practices used by farmers and farming organizations. At the University of Bristol, Childress is excited to explore the intersection of her interests in the environment, language, and people’s relationships to the land they live on. She is eager to see how different forms of art have propelled change throughout history and in different environmental justice movements. She is particularly looking forward to seeing how Bristol’s sustainability efforts are communicated with the community, and the real-life impacts of that communication.

This will be Childress’s first time traveling abroad and she aims to make meaningful connections with other programme and community members. She hopes to maintain these connections and bring back lessons she learns from Bristol and the programme to her Kentucky hometown.