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Session Submission Summary

How Do They Understand the Science? Communicating Science, Risks, and Disasters 1

Thu, August 30, 9:00 to 10:30am, ICC, E3.6

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Recent disasters have put science into the spotlight and have allowed non-scientists to see how science operates in their daily lives. Climate change, earthquakes, violent storms, wildfires, and epidemics have been a few of the disasters that cross borders and dominate our headlines. Scientists have their own understanding of these disasters, and work on a bedrock of science that is comfortable with uncertainty (be it in reporting a margin of error, or in talking about approximations rather than absolutes) and tend to expresses risk in terms of numbers and statistics. In turn, science communication, as well as disaster communication, often operates on the principle that people do not know the facts well enough and need to be informed about them (the so-called “deficit model”). Recent research, however, shows that such a model takes little account of the culture and perceptions of risk of the audience. Research likewise shows that the process of communicating scientific knowledge to reduce risk in disaster-prone areas, or of getting a disease or a health hazard, is usually carried out with little understanding of how the community would understand and act on such knowledge. We invite researchers who work in science and risk communication, especially those who examine the audiences who received information about risk and disaster to contribute to our panel. We look for papers that would shed light on the unique epistemologies of our audiences, and how these understandings can change how they view the world, and the role of science in it.

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