The game of goodwill: an exploratory study of discursive goodwill strategies of interest organizations in a consensus democracy

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Political public relations and strategic framing

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Chapter 7 Political Public Relations and Strategic Framing

Frames advance coherent interpretations of issues that suggest specific problem definitions, causes, moral evaluations, and courses of action. As such, frames highlight certain aspects of an issue, and downplay or ignore others. While the use of frames is inevitable—i.e., the act of framing—actors do use frames strategically in their attempts to define issues in a way favorable to them and in their efforts to influence the course of action on issues. This is especially the case in the political realm. Thus, strategic framing is crucial to political public relations. This chapter offers a brief introduction to framing theory before shedding light on the specific ways in which political actors use frames strategically and to what effect

Using Rhetorical Situations to Examine and Improve Vaccination Communication

Opinion polls have documented a considerable public skepticism towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Seeking to address the vaccine skepticism challenge this essay surveys the research on vaccine hesitancy and trust building through the lens of the rhetorical situation and points towards five broad principles for a content strategy for public health communicators in regards to vaccination: 1) vaccine hesitancy is not irrational per se; 2) messages should be tailored to the various hesitancy drivers; 3) what is perceived as trustworthy is situational and constantly negotiated; 4) in areas of uncertainty where no exact knowledge exists, the character of the speaker becomes more important; and 5) the trustworthiness of the speaker can be strengthened through finding some common ground—such as shared feelings or accepted premises—with the audience. Such common insights are on offer in the literature on rhetoric and persuasion and linked here with the research on vaccine communication and trust focusing specifically on the latter and character

Manufacturing Humanitarian Imagery: Explaining Norwegian Refugee Council’s Public Communication Strategies Toward the Syrian and Central African Crises

As refugee organizations’ communication can influence public perceptions, this study analyzes the underlying motivations and practices. To explain Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) public communication strategies toward the recent Syrian and Central African crises, we conducted a 3-week office ethnography at its main communication department, interviewed 10 communication officers, and analyzed key communication policy documents. First, NRC’s discursive strategies are molded by medium-based and/or context-sensitive routines, organizational goals and trends, and challenging institutional and societal contexts. Second, NRC’s crisis foci are institutionally shaped through the “Vicious Neglected Crisis Circle effect,” which is reinforced and/or limited by organizational and individual (counter) incentives, sensitive contexts, and context-sensitive routines. Third, NRC’s choice of represented forcibly displaced people is influenced by various selection criteria and sociodemographic-specific reasons. Thus, complex organizational, institutional, and societal contexts largely shape public communication strategies, suggesting that reflexivity and structural institutional changes are essential to achieve more balanced, representative humanitarian imageries

Chapter 7 Political Public Relations and Strategic Framing

Frames advance coherent interpretations of issues that suggest specific problem definitions, causes, moral evaluations, and courses of action. As such, frames highlight certain aspects of an issue, and downplay or ignore others. While the use of frames is inevitable—i.e., the act of framing—actors do use frames strategically in their attempts to define issues in a way favorable to them and in their efforts to influence the course of action on issues. This is especially the case in the political realm. Thus, strategic framing is crucial to political public relations. This chapter offers a brief introduction to framing theory before shedding light on the specific ways in which political actors use frames strategically and to what effect

Public Ethos in the Pandemic Rhetorical Situation:Strategies for Building Trust in Authorities’ Risk Communication

As illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, risk and crisis communication are crucial responsibilities of modern governments. Existing research on risk and crisis communication points to the importance of trust, both as a resource in and an end goal of communicative activities. In this paper, we argue that revisiting the classical rhetorical concept of ethos in combination with the modern concept of the rhetorical situation can contribute to fitting responses in risk and crisis communication. The paper examines how appeals to ethos may build trust in health authorities’ public communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews and participant observation in public health institutions that handle the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway, the paper finds that understanding the rhetorical situation of the pandemic allows for a better understanding of the available means of persuasion. For instance, through the active communication of transparency and independence when faced by uncertainty and rapidly changing information

From Movements to Metrics: Evaluating Explainable AI Methods in Skeleton-Based Human Activity Recognition

The advancement of deep learning in human activity recognition (HAR) using 3D skeleton data is critical for applications in healthcare, security, sports, and human-computer interaction. This paper tackles a well-known gap in the field, which is the lack of testing in the applicability and reliability of XAI evaluation metrics in the skeleton-based HAR domain. We have tested established XAI metrics namely faithfulness and stability on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) to address this problem. The study also introduces a perturbation method that respects human biomechanical constraints to ensure realistic variations in human movement. Our findings indicate that \textit{faithfulness} may not be a reliable metric in certain contexts, such as with the EfficientGCN model. Conversely, stability emerges as a more dependable metric when there is slight input data perturbations. CAM and Grad-CAM are also found to produce almost identical explanations, leading to very similar XAI metric performance. This calls for the need for more diversified metrics and new XAI methods applied in skeleton-based HAR