Further....

Unformatted Document Text: Kinsella / Environmental Risk Communication Extended Abstract 4/30/07 Reconceptualizing Environmental Risk Communication: Toward a Critical, Constitutive Framework Extended Abstract Revised 30 April 2007 This essay develops a critical, constitutive framework for the analysis of environmental risk communication, incorporating perspectives from communication theory and from European sociology. In offering this framework I seek to expand the role of communication theory in a field that comprises a multiplicity of competing, and often theoretically impoverished, models of communication. As an explicitly critical approach, the framework emphasizes the inherently political aspects of risk communication and related issues of organizational and institutional power. It does so by adopting a constitutive model of risk communication, in contrast to prevailing representational, informational, and persuasive models. In order to move beyond unelaborated claims that risks are constituted through discourse, I link phenomenologically-grounded, constitutive theories of communication (e.g., Anton 1999; Deetz, 1973, 1992; Stewart, 1972, 1986, 1995, 1996) with the risk society perspective of Ulrich Beck (1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b, 1999) and the functional systems theory of Niklas Luhmann (1989, 1990, 1993). Although the communication discipline has recognized the general relevance of Luhmann’s work, and to a lesser extent Beck’s, and those authors have written extensively on issues of ecology, risk, trust, and power, the connections between communication theory and their perspectives on ecology and risk have not yet been adequately explored. 1 To help facilitate that exploration, this essay focuses on the discursive constitution of environmental risks, understood as a specific category within the broad and amorphous field of risk communication. This analytical focus distinguishes environmental risks within a wider domain of discursive objects such as personal health risks (e.g., diet, sex, smoking), safety and property risks (e.g., accidents, crime, natural disasters), economic and financial risks (e.g., entrepreneurship, insurance, investments), and the many other personal, social, and institutional risks that Beck and others (e.g., Adam, Beck, & Van Loon, 2000; Beck, Giddens, & Lash, 1994; Flyvbjerg, 2003; Franklin, 1998; Giddens, 1990; Lash, Szerszynski, & Wynne, 1996; Taylor-Gooby & Zinn, 2006) have identified with contemporary conditions. I must stress, however, that this distinction is artificial and temporary; in Luhmann’s terms it is a binary, operational code adopted for the critical purposes of this essay. Although the distinction is intended to select a relatively coherent range of phenomena or topoi for examination, one of my primary analytical premises is that environmental risks are connected to broader social and institutional patterns and must be understood in those terms. Although several authors have focused on environmental risk using concepts adapted from Beck (e.g., Cohen, 2000; Marshall, 1999; Pidgeon, Simmons, & Henwood, 2006; Rutherford, 1999), here I seek to add to those analyses by comparing, contrasting, and when possible, integrating Beck’s perspective with Luhmann’s and with constitutive communication theory. Ecological Communication, Crisis, and Kairos Both Beck (1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b, 1999) and Luhmann (1990, 1993) have argued compellingly that risk has become a pervasive, general organizing principle within contemporary society. In Beck’s formulation, the familiar social, economic, and political problems associated