Theory and language of climate change communication

Climate change communication has become a salient topic in science and society. It has grown to be something like a booming industry alongside more established ‘communication enterprises’, such as health communication, risk communication, and science communication. This article situates the theory of climate change communication within theoretical developments in the field of science communication. It discusses the importance and difficulties inherent in talking about climate change to different types of publics using various types of communication tools and strategies. It engages with the difficult issue of the relationship between climate change communication and behavior change, and it focuses, in particular, on the role of language (metaphors, words, strategies, frames, and narratives) in conveying climate change issues to stakeholders. In the process, it attempts to provide an overview of emerging theories of climate change communication, theories that recently have begun to proliferate quite dramatically. In some cases, we can, therefore only provide signposts to the most relevant research that is being carried out with regard to climate change communication without being able to engage with all its aspects. We end with an assessment of how communication could be improved in light of the theories and practices discussed in this article

The sacred and the profane: biotechnology, rationality, and public debate

Davies G, 2006. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A, 38(3), pp. 423 – 443 DOI: 10.1068/a37387This paper explores the forms of argumentation employed by participants in a recent public engagement process in the United Kingdom around new technologies for organ transplantation, with specific reference to xenotransplantation and stem-cell research. Two forms of reasoning recur throughout participants’ deliberations which challenge specialist framing of this issue. First, an often scatological humour and sense of the profane are evident in the ways in which participants discuss the bodily transformations that such technologies demand. Second, a sense of the sacred, in which new biotechnologies are viewed as against nature or in which commercial companies are ‘playing god’, is a repetitive and well-recognised concern. Such forms of reasoning are frequently dismissed by policymakers as ‘uninformed gut reactions’. Yet they also form a significant part of the repertoire of scientists themselves as they proclaim the hope of new medical breakthroughs, or seek to reconstruct ideas of the body to facilitate new biotechnological transformations. Through questioning of assumptions in Habermas’s notion of discourse ethics, and exploring the importance of hybridity and corporeality as concepts in ethical thinking, the author suggests that, far from being ill-formed opinions, such reasonings perform an important function for thinking through the ontological significance of the corporealisation of these proposed new forms of human and animal bodies

Care in the time of catastrophe: citizenship, community and the ecological imagination

Published without an abstract

Voludensitometrie: Visualisation tridimensionnelle d'organes

Pour étudier la cartographie volumique de la densité de matière (imagerie par rayons X), de la densité protonique (imagerie RMN) ou de l'activité spécifique d'un traceur radioactif (imagerie γ ou β+) on reconstruit à partir de mesures sur des détecteurs un ensemble de résultats de calculs ou voxels repérables par un triplet de coordonnées d'espace et représentant une estimation locale du paramètre étudié. Les concepts de représentation développés s'étendent d'ailleurs à tout paramètre pour lequel l'additivité a un sens. L'opérateur doit piloter un logiciel d'analyse afin d'élaborer les documents lui permettant d'obtenir une représentation mentale de l'objet. Sur un écran de visualisation ces documents seront soit des graphiques, soit des images, soit des séquences d'images. Le processus élémentaire d'élaboration d'une image comprend: - le conditionnement du volume: . définition d'un repère absolu (transformations géométriques) . extraction interactive (chirurgie) ou automatique (segmentation) de sous-volumes . mise en forme contextuelle (agencement des sous volumes, dissolution) - la réduction à deux dimensions de l'information soit par intégration spatiale (radiographie), soit par représentation de surface (morphoscopie) La communication présente ces différents concepts pouvant donner lieu au développement d'une console interactive de visualisation. Des séquences, enregistrées sur vidéo cassettes et réalisées à partir d'un logiciel expérimental, illustrent les premiers résultats obtenus