CALL FOR PAPERS: Communicating Scientific Risk though Mass Media: 
Theoretical and Empirical Explorations 

This workshop is part of a conference on LANGUAGE & THE SCIENTIFIC 
IMAGINATION at the University of Helsinki (28 Jul - 2 Aug 2008) - the 11th 
Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas.  

OVERVIEW:
Risks arise when an activity or event contains a degree of uncertainty to 
which a value judgement is attached.

Various features of scientific risk make its communication via the media 
particularly challenging, not least the fact that scientific risk often 
deals with phenomena invisible to the human eye, explained only through 
specialised terminology requiring scientific literacy. Scientific 
understanding is often disputed amongst scientists themselves, expressed 
in terms of probabilities and uncertainties. This is even more pronounced 
in ‘postnormal’ science issues, such as nuclear power, bioengineering and 
biotechnology, where ignorance predominates, rendering quantification 
problematic. 

This workshop invites studies that explore the mass media’s role in 
communicating scientific risk, and the uncertainties therein. The 
following themes are envisaged.
       
- The media’s role in placing scientific risks on public and political 
agendas. Arguably, the media influence what, and how, scientific issues 
are defined as risks through patterns of coverage, framing of stories and 
selective presentation of claims.  Here, relevant theoretical frameworks 
include public and policy agenda-setting and agenda-building, Social 
Amplification of Risk Framework, moral panics, Risk Society thesis, Public 
Understanding of Science, and Science and Society.  Are these frameworks 
adequate? How do factors like trust, strategy, rhetoric, information 
subsidies and scientific literacy impact on mass-mediated scientific risk 
communication?

- The media’s role in shaping public acceptability of scientific risks. 
Judgements about acceptability are central to determining risk levels that 
society will bear. Arguably, advancements in understanding and measuring 
risk have facilitated its conversion into serviceable use to control, 
predict, commit to, and protect against, the future across many applied 
fields, including science. How do the media encourage us to imagine, 
negotiate, embrace or reject scientific risks? Here, approaches range from 
conceptualising the media audience as a repository for irrational fears, 
to active and interactive audiences that interpret and produce media risk 
discourses according to their own values and needs.

- Deconstructing media forms in scientific risk communication. Most Media 
Studies literature on risk communication comes from the perspective of the 
sociology of news, promotional campaigns, and ‘old’ rather than new media, 
informed by concepts like primary definition, source strategies, news 
values, gate-keeping and audience targeting. We welcome such studies in 
the domain of scientific risk communication, but particularly encourage 
papers exploring non-news-based factual media forms such as documentary 
and reality TV; fictional forms like film and soap opera; and new media 
forms. How is scientific risk communication impacted by genre, realism, 
narrative, identification, interactivity, instantaneity, manipulability, 
and authenticity?

Please email abstract proposals to: 

Dr. Vian Bakir, University of Glamorgan, Wales
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Further conference details can be found at: http://issei2008.haifa.ac.il/