Emily Polk

Emily Polk is an Advanced Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and the Coordinator for the Notation in Science Communication. She teaches and researches the rhetoric of sustainability and environmental justice and the communication of global social movements in digital and public spheres. Prior to getting her doctorate, Emily worked for nearly ten years around the world as a media professional, helping to produce radio documentaries in Burmese refugee camps, and facilitating a human rights-based newspaper in a Liberian refugee camp. She has also worked as an editor at Whole Earth Magazine and at CSRwire, a leading global source of corporate social responsibility news. Her own writing and radio documentaries have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, the Boston Globe, NPR, Creative Nonfiction, National Radio Project, AlterNet, Central America Weekly, the Ghanaian Chronicle, and Whole Earth Magazine, among others. Her first book, Communicating Global to Local Resiliency: A Case Study of the Transition Movement, was released in 2015. Emily's courses focus on global development, climate change, and environmental justice, and invite students to interrogate the discourses (and assumptions) around the approaches, methods, and ideologies regarding how and when social change happens.

Currently teaching