Bridie McGreavy – Mitchell Center Leadership Council
Associate Professor of Environmental Communication
Bridie McGreavy is an associate professor of environmental communication, and has served as a faculty fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions since 2016. She received her doctorate in communication with a concentration in sustainability science from UMaine in 2013.
McGreavy’s research focuses on how communication shapes sustainability and justice efforts in coastal shellfishing communities, as well as river restoration projects and freshwater conservation initiatives. She has studied crisis narratives in reporting about clam fisheries, communication around river restoration and dam removal in the Penobscot Nation, coalition building among coastal stakeholders and within interdisciplinary science teams and more. McGreavy’s research aims to center clammers and Wabanaki voices in conversations around coastal access, and inform policy to incentivize coastal access to develop climate adaptation policies that fit contemporary needs.
McGreavy’s interest in sustainability came from growing up in the Saco River watershed in what is now known as western Maine, where there are a host of pressing issues related to water justice and sustainability. . As a graduate student researching vernal pools at Antioch University, she started looking at municipal official perceptions about vernal pool legislation. Through this early study, she became more aware of how important communication is to capacity building and policy change, and decided to pursue environmental communication academically.
McGreavy started working for the Sustainability Solutions Initiative, which eventually became the Mitchell Center, as a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Journalism at UMaine. She was drawn to the initiative because of its emphasis on the co-creation of knowledge with communities. McGreavy hopes that her involvement with the Mitchell Center Leadership Council will shape the next phase of the center. She brings a deep institutional knowledge with her, and an orientation to communication as listening that she thinks will be valuable to their efforts.
McGreavy leads the Environmental Communication Community of Practice (EC CooP), a group of students, faculty, and research partners who share interests in environmental communication and sustainability. She served as chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Maine Shellfish Restoration and Resilience Fund, which supported community-led grants for shellfish harvesters and communities. She also leads the Maine Shellfish Learning Network, a coastwide initiative to support learning, leadership and equity in Maine and Wabanaki wild clam and mussel fisheries, and continues to support development of their collaborative webpage, The Mudflat. McGreavy also served as a co-principal investigator on UMaine’s NSF Research Traineeship in Conservation Science, and currently serves as senior personnel on the Maine eDNA Project. She is currently working on a book entitled “Mud and Tides: A Poetics of Collaboration,” which shares insights about the interconnections between communication, ecology, and collaboration that co-authors learned in the context of many of the efforts described above.