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In a southwestern Virginia county, yellow yard signs, bumper stickers, and billboards pepper lawns, cars, and roadsides. They read, “Don’t Nuke SWVA” and were distributed by a coalition of grassroots organizations resisting local development plans for data centers that could be powered by small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). State bodies have targeted the Virginia coalfields for data centers and SMRs since at least 2022 when former governor Glenn Youngkin announced that Virginia’s first SMR would be located there. Though Youngkin repealed this plan, funding continues to flood in for site assessment and nuclear workforce development.
Not all local government initiatives that residents believe to be tied to SMR development have been so explicit. In fact, it has been a lack of specific commitments in some initiatives that rallied local environmental justice organizers to listen to what they were not being told by county leaders.
In August of 2025, a vague referendum appeared on local election ballots. Above the option to select yes or no, it read: “Shall [the county] participate as a member of an electric authority created by the County to operate within the County?” Approved for the ballot by the board of supervisors with no public hearing, county officials advertised this referendum as crucial for economic development. The authority would strictly serve commercial and industrial properties, which many residents consider sorely needed. These projects are currently deterred by the county’s lack of affordable energy. Residents were told that if industrial projects generated their own power through the authority, energy costs for citizens would not rise with industrial development. Essentially, the electric authority was sold as a “win-win” for industry and locals.
Promises like these have high stakes in Central Appalachia. A century of development projects has resulted in waves of depopulation, environmental toxicity, and severe economic downturn. Consequently, many in the region are fervently seeking strategies for community vitality. Economic development is often the primary goal, and while this is desirable for many residents, the region’s uneven history of development means these projects can invite as much skepticism as they do hope.
Some county residents interpreted the evasive referendum as a backdoor strategy for the local government to make energy decisions without community input. When county officials dodged these concerns, local organizers focused on unveiling what the supervisors were communicating by not talking about the referendum.
In any communicative event, what is not said can carry as much meaning as what is. If I ask an interlocutor a direct question and they change the topic without answering, I might gather that they do not wish to answer. Under H. Paul Grice’s framework for cooperative conversation, my interlocutor flouts the conversational maxim of relation by refusing to provide a relevant response. For Grice, flouting conversational maxims does not prohibit communication, but instead leads to “conversational implicature”: information is communicated beyond the conventional meaning of words. Keith Basso, Richard Bauman, and other critics of speech-centric approaches to communication have also illustrated that not speaking about something—whether through refraining from words altogether or just words on a particular topic—does not mean nothing is communicated. Instead, silence often functions like an index: a sign whose meaning depends on when and where it occurs. In the above example, the information my interlocutor’s refusal communicated would likely be inferred from the specifics of the interaction: our relationship to each other, the content of the question, and where and when the question was asked.
Illuminating the productive capacity of not speaking became a foundational strategy of local organizers in southwest Virginia. They drew attention to what withholding information about development projects meant then and there: a region with a century-long status as an energy sacrifice zone, or a location in which the health and futures of the population and landscape are foreclosed by federal and industrial efforts to support the resource needs of those elsewhere. With this strategy, the organizers subverted what I call the “sovereign silence” of local officials. James Slotta argues that the scholarly and political alignment of voice and self-sovereignty—“the right to speak”—obfuscates the ways power can be exercised when not speaking. As counterpart to sovereign speech and in line with scholarly explorations of refusal, sovereign silence refers to the exercise of sovereignty by a governing body through withholding information. By highlighting the meaning of the board’s lack of relevant speech, organizers undermined the board’s use of sovereign silence to advance their agenda.
Monthly meetings with the county’s board of supervisors were the primary site for organizers and local officials to negotiate the referendum. These meetings followed a fixed format that designated time for “public expression” before board comments. During public expression, speakers would stand at the podium in the center of the room, give their names and addresses, and be allotted three minutes for their comments. Often, comments attempted to elicit information from the supervisors, but they had no obligation to respond. At one meeting, several attendees questioned the board’s use of taxpayer funds to distribute flyers on the referendum titled “Vote yes!” Residents brought fiscal records and Virginia law codes, and they demanded the supervisors speak to the legality of their advertising practices. During board comments, most supervisors replied, “No comment.” Two supervisors encouraged attendance at that weekend’s local bluegrass festival.
Elsewhere, the supervisors’ lack of relevant response might have been called out by an interlocutor or audience as evasive or irrelevant. However, the regulated communicative structure of these meetings favored the sovereign silence of the board: if attendees spoke outside of their allotted time, the chairman stopped them. The looming presence of a sheriff’s deputy in the back of the room deterred any resistance. Thus, community members could not confront the supervisors about their evasiveness once the former’s time to speak is over. In response, some organizers would begin their time at the podium with, “I know you never answer our questions, but…” Other organizers found creative ways to draw attention to what was communicated by the supervisors’ silence. Consequently, organizers compromised the board’s attempt to exercise power through obfuscation and silence on the referendum.
On one memorable occasion, a county resident and Appalachian environmental activist named Katrina approached the podium during public expression. With an expectant smile, she carried a small gift bag. As she reached the microphone, the 3-minute timer projected on a large screen began to tick down. As the seconds passed, Katrina carefully placed objects atop the podium: a set of salt and pepper shakers, a napkin holder, and a “shelf-sitter,” all decoratively shaped like pigs. She placed the gift bag near the figurines and read her prepared statement aloud. With election day nearing, she surveyed questions whose answers the board had not publicly discussed: Who are the proposed members of this authority? How will it be financed? If the referendum is not truly about nuclear energy, then why are there not as many site assessments for natural gas plants as there are for nuclear energy? “To inform citizens with answers to the questions they have,” she concluded, “would prevent them from buying a pig in a poke, or more accurately voting for a pig in a poke. I urge you as responsible supervisors and members of the voting public to vote NO on this ballot measure.”
Katrina was silent for part of her allotted three minutes in order to set up the display for the board and public. While her questions gave form to what the supervisors left unsaid, she bolstered her talk with a visual display based on a once widespread but now relatively localized idiom; to “buy a pig in a poke” refers to getting swindled or making a bad deal because of missing information. Though declining in use, “poke” is a regional term meaning sack or, most commonly now, a brown paper bag. Comparing the referendum to a pig in a poke suggests that voters do not know what they are getting if they vote yes. Further, the dramatic presentation of this regionally specific idiom parallels the board’s silence in that its use then and there indexes what residents could be getting in the absence of transparency: another economic promise that would do little more than further entrench obstacles to community flourishing. Katrina herself organized against some of these previous promises, most recently a coal-fired power plant that began operation in 2012.
A seasoned meeting participant, Katrina knew better than to expect a verbal response from the board. Instead, she addressed them as voters and urged them to vote responsibly. If they did not have further information, as their silence implied, then the responsible vote would be no. To vote otherwise would assure the public that they were indeed withholding information.
The referendum failed by an 8% margin. By drawing attention to silence and evasion as communicative acts that carry meaning, community members such as Katrina could disrupt the board’s ability to exercise power through sovereign silence. At the board meeting following the election, the supervisors were noticeably disappointed by the outcome. During public expression, another organizer told the board, “I understand why you all are desperate to latch on to any economic promises that are made to us… We are here because you won’t give us the information that we wanted… We’ve been working for three years since the [data center project] was announced with secrecy, and deception… It’s the same song and dance, where we get these massive economic promises that never come out… You lost that referendum because of your approach and because of your leaving us out of the conversation.”
Siri Lamoureaux and Courtney Handman are the section contributing editors for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.