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This paper examines the construction of avian influenza in Australian media and federal government policy, with a focus placed on discourses of contagion, preparedness and risk. The threat of an infectious disease outbreak, such as avian influenza, on social life is surrounded by a range of collective narratives which attempt to make it explicable. These narratives socially define the disease and provide explanations for its existence. The paper demonstrates that central to these narratives are depictions of the source of the outbreak and suggestions of appropriate responses to the threat. Methodologically, a narrative analysis of print media and government documents was conducted. This showed that conceptually both government and media discourses could be understood in terms of risk, contagion and blame. Furthermore, it was found that narratives linking the risk of avian influenza with globalised interconnectedness and contagion by the developing world underpin discourses of causation and frame the reactions to and preparation for a potential outbreak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2009, the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) published a review of MDMA (ecstasy) which recommended a reclassification from the highest class A to the 'intermediate category' class B, on the basis of a review of recent scientific research. This became a matter of news attention alongside a recent journal article by Professor David Nutt, the chairman of the ACMD, in which ecstasy consumption was suggested to be no more dangerous than horse-riding. The home secretary Jacqui Smith rejected the recommendations and Professor Nutt was forced to apologise for making the comparison. Some sections of the media coverage around this topic contrasted the (implicitly irrational) political response to the review with the authority of the scientific evidence it represented, while other media accounts characterised Nutt either as an 'out of touch', or 'immoral' academic or as having a politically motivated social agenda. In this way, risk issues are played out in, and through, media discourses of science and political authority. This paper analyses the national newspaper coverage of the debate around the risks of ecstasy use and drug classification in the context of the political imperatives within media accounts, and identifies the key discursive strategies employed by those engaged in the media debate. The paper briefly discusses the relevance of a number of risk theories before focusing on the governmentality approach to risk in order to explain how, despite the conservatism inherent in recent drug policy, the neo-liberal managerialism evident in recent UK governmental discourses largely sets the agenda in the media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is widespread concern among people living in some parts of Altai territory in Siberia about potential health effects from fallout from rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Extensive research has so far failed to provide evidence to support these concerns. As a consequence, the problem has been labelled by Russian scientists as 'collective psychosocial distress' or 'raketophobia'. The aim of this paper is to provide an understanding of the factors underlying popular concerns about rockets. The paper is based on data collected in 2006 using multiple methods (individual semi-structured interviews, natural group discussions, round tables and participant observation). Concerns related to the impact of the rocket launches among the local population were explored. The analytical framework is informed by discourse analysis and discursive psychology. The findings are that the processes of collective social construction amplify risks perceived to be associated with rocket launches. In the Altai context, this social amplification builds on a societal vulnerability triggered by the collapse of the Soviet ideology. The environmental concern provides opportunities for repressed debates to be expressed that emerge from culturally embedded frustrations and fears that would otherwise be ignored by the political agenda. Moreover, the signals that shape the perception of risk are intrinsic components of local information flows, so that the communication process between experts and policy-makers and the local population itself contributes to the amplification of perceived risks. Concern about the health effects of rockets can be traced to the conditions that existed when the USSR ceased to exist. An effective response must address these deep-seated issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Categorization -- generally understood as definition of situations (including events, actions, roles/identities, knowledge claims etc) in everyday and professional/institutional settings -- is a meaning-making activity, deeply embodied in human experience and understanding. Language and discourse play a significant part in how we categorize events and things in discipline-specific ways. Contributors to this Special Issue of Health, Risk & Society approach risk categorization and its explanatory status in a range of healthcare settings -- genetics, cancer, HIV/AIDS, hormone replacement therapy -- from a discourse analytical perspective (broadly defined as language and interaction in context-specific environments). Research practice -- what we choose to study, how we select our data sites and analytic frameworks and how we formulate our findings -- constitutes categorization work par excellence and so remains a candidate project in reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how talk between researchers and their volunteer human subjects works to construct a safe and supportive environment in a laboratory setting where women volunteers participate in the development of a new imaging technology with potential for diagnosing breast cancer. Drawing on discourse analysis perspectives, we explore the work talk has to do in order to facilitate the instrumental, ethical and social dimensions of the interaction between researchers, volunteers and technology. An important cross-cutting theme is the use of various discursive strategies by both researchers and volunteers to manage perceptions of risk and construct a safe research environment, which will foster the active cooperation from volunteers necessary to achieve successful research outcomes. We draw attention to the interactive and two-way character of the technology talk observed in our research setting and how it co-produces researchers, volunteer subjects and the technology and supports the working social relationship between them that is vital to success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air mobility spans most of the globe, but its side effects are concentrated in relatively small localities. In this paper aircraft noise annoyance is interpreted from the perspective of risk society theory as described by Ulrich Beck. With the increase in air mobility, side effects like noise nuisance gradually dominate the air mobility discussions. The logic of wealth distribution is thereby replaced by the logic of risk distribution. General annoyance statistics support this interpretation. But these statistics actually construct noise annoyance in the first place. Airport planners and professionals intentionally introduced the issue of noise annoyance to a wider audience. This exemplifies the ambivalence of risk theory as proposed by Beck. He employs a constructivist perspective, however he has a tendency to naturalize hazards. The dynamics that Beck describes as reflexive thrive on the inherent capacity of pollutants to confront the society that brought them forth. This article uses a constructivist perspective, argumentative discourse analysis, to investigate how policy practices turned aircraft sound into noise annoyance. Noise policies predate the ‘unintended consequences’ Beck speaks about. Once established, aircraft noise policies are a political opportunity for mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways young people in Hong Kong at different stages of involvement with illegal drugs respond to government produced anti-drug television commercials through a methodology which provided them with the technical skills and equipment to make their own short videos about drugs. An analysis of the videos they produced and their interaction while producing them reveals that participants with different drug-taking experiences have very different and often multiple ways of talking about drugs, and that these different 'discourses' and the ways they are deployed in different contexts affect how 'at-risk' they are for new or continued drug use and how they respond to anti-drug messages designed to mitigate this risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses of HIV status neutrality have emerged in the wake of advances in biomedical technologies for HIV prevention and treatment of HIV. The combined effects of Treatment as Prevention (TasP) and Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) give rise to the possibility of dramatically curbing new HIV infections and nurture fantasies about an HIV-free/risk-free futurity. In this article, we consider the possibilities of HIV neutrality as a social-material assemblage entangling different institutional investments and practices, discourses about HIV risk and prevention, historical memories, political rationalities, and as a generative point of contact between and across different actors, institutions and objects. We explore the different logics and sentiments that are being drawn together in three different sites where HIV neutrality is configured. Borrowing from cultural and social science approaches that grapple with emotions and feelings as 'distributed phenomena' that carry political and social significance, we interrogate the work of HIV neutrality in effecting new tensions in the affective economies underpinning gay sexual socialities' relation to HIV/AIDS and HIV risk. Our analysis suggests that as these new social-material strategies emerge to manage HIV risk, they entangle historically sedimented effects of HIV/AIDS. We ask to what extent these assemblages are productive of new intimacies and alliances, and possibly renewed entrenchments of bio-social boundaries cutting across gay male socialities in North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the way risk is constructed in the stories gay men tell of their sexual experiences. It focuses on how tellers use such stories to portray themselves both as rational actors and as legitimate members of their social groups by reconstructing the 'orderliness' of sexual encounters. An analysis of a corpus of stories derived from a diary study of gay male sexual behaviour in Hong Kong using current theories of discourse analysis reveals how narrators organize their experiences along two primary vectors of engagement: a sequential vector along which the trajectory of the sexual encounter is presented as a chain of occurrences, each occurrence contingent upon previous ones and warranting subsequent ones, and a hierarchical vector along which processes perceived on longer timescales are portrayed as exerting pressure on the ways processes on shorter timescales unfold. Examining how men portray these vectors in their accounts of risk behaviour can help us better understand both the situatedness of risk behaviour and the ways it is linked to larger social practices, identity projects and community histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following a restructuring of Swedish healthcare in the 1990s - moving from a welfare model to one inspired by New Public Management - maternity care in Sweden is increasingly centralised to bigger towns. This has led to several units being relocated or forced to close, and to a bigger distance to maternity care for women living in smaller towns and rural areas. In the present article, I analyse the media reporting on the recent closure of the maternity ward in Sollefteå, a small town in Sweden’s northern region. Using intersectional risk theory, I explore how pregnancy-related risks are articulated in Swedish newspapers, and how such articulations relate to power and ideology. Articles from three Swedish newspapers, published during a 4-month period, have been analysed using critical discourse analysis. I conclude that the newspaper articles were most likely to stress the family as the main ‘risk victim’, while the pregnant woman was rarely the focus of risk articulations. When she was, risks were described as ‘worry’ or ‘unworthiness’, and never in medical terms. When such articulations appeared within an individualist ideological discourse, they were naturalised and as such, disconnected from the political decision to close the maternity ward. My contention is that a feminist perspective is largely missing in the media articles and that a bigger focus on the effect that maternity ward closures have for women living outside urban centres is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In hegemonic risk discourses, hospital obstetric units are represented as the safest and best birth settings; however, a minority of women in England and Wales (2.3% in 2014) still opt for home birth. In this article, I analyse pro-home birth discourses on a UK-based online discussion group for pregnant women covering the period 2010–2015 and collected in March 2016, to identify how individuals making pro-home birth posts on the site represented home birth as a morally responsible choice. Using Foucauldian discourse analysis, I identify three main themes: home births as a normal process, representing an intimate, existential life moment which meets women’s needs for care and personal autonomy, and is convenient and relatively safe, in contrast to hospital births which are characterised as risky; home births as morally legitimate and justified by discourses of evidence-based risk assessment, woman centredness and empowerment; and home birth as not risky and the mothers who opt for it were not taking unnecessary risks but were acting responsibly. In this article, I examine the ways in which the online setting can be used to resist dominant risk discourses. I show how the participants in the online discussion group in my study used available discursive resources to challenge hegemonic risk discourses regarding birth setting, making resistance to dominant risk discourses possible, as pro-home birth discourses legitimised ‘nonconformist’ decisions regarding birth setting. The focus on the ‘risk-takers’ in this article is valuable for healthcare practitioners seeking to improve their communication about birth setting choices with pregnant women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the ways in which media frames and rhetorical devices in the Chinese media shaped the representation of the genetically modified (GM) golden rice. We draw on a study of Chinese media representations of an experiment designed to test the efficacy of golden rice as a source of Vitamin A using school children in China’s Hunan province as subjects. The study analysed Chinese web news stories about the Hunan experiment posted between 30 August 2012 (when Greenpeace first reported on the issue) and 30 October 2012. This experiment resulted in allegations of breaches in scientific protocols and created a hostile public reaction. The incident fuelled the long-standing debate about the risks and benefits of GM crops in China. In this article, we analyse 25 online news reports, examining the attitudinal orientation of the articles, the readers’ comments on the articles and GM crops, the writing style and rhetorical devices employed, the emotions provoked and the frames manifest and embedded in these articles and comments. We found that although only one-third of the articles manifested an obviously negative attitude towards golden rice and GM foods, their use of strident metaphors and analogies were designed to arouse readers’ fear and concerns about GM crops. In the anti-golden rice articles, we identified conspiracy frames, including the view that the West was using genetic engineering to establish global control over agriculture and that GM products were instruments for genocide. The pro-golden rice articles emphasised the scientific humanitarian progress, but it appears to be less attractive to the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine the ‘risk of knowing’ talk (Sarangi, S.,et al., 2003. ‘Relatively speaking’: relativisation of genetic risk in counselling for predictive testing.Health, risk&society, 5 (2), 155–170, p. 155) in prenatal screening for Down’s syndrome in Hong Kong. The ‘risk of knowing’ talk refers to the consequences of learning about a health condition, such as the psychosocial and interpersonal implications of testing, and the subsequent management of the condition. The stigma of eugenics and that the termination of pregnancy is the only available ‘medical intervention’ imply that the risk talk and decision-making in prenatal screening carry serious ethical, moral and social implications (Pilnick, A. and Zayts, O.A, 2012. ‘Let’s have it tested first’: choice and circumstances in decision-making following positive antenatal screening in Hong Kong.Sociology of health and illness, 34 (2), 266–282). This issue has not attracted much attention in the previous literature. This study is part of a larger project on prenatal screening conducted in one Prenatal Diagnostics and Counselling Department of a Hong Kong hospital in 2006–2013. It draws on 20 video-recorded consultations with pregnant women who had received a ‘positive’ (high risk) screening result and were invited to consider further diagnostic testing. Using theme-oriented discourse analysis (Roberts, C. and Sarangi, S., 2005. Theme-oriented discourse analysis of medical encounters.Medical education, 39 (6), 632–640), we show that in these consultations, the ‘risk of knowing’ talk was not initiated by the health care professionals. It might, however, be evoked by the women. We examine the impact of the ‘risk of knowing’ on decision-making, and discuss specific discourse (linguistic and rhetorical) devices that the participants employed to negotiate three competing agendas: the health care professionals’ preference of diagnostic testing, clients’ concerns of having a baby with Down’s syndrome and the overarching professional goal of these encounters of facilitating the clients’ informed choice regarding further testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that ‘older’ mothers experience elevated risks during pregnancy and childbirth has proliferated since the mid-twentieth century. In this article, we take the contemporary concern with age as a starting point from which to historicise and contextualise the concept of maternity risk. To this end, we examine maternal hygiene manuals (self-help guidebooks on motherhood and pregnancy) published between 1880 and 1920 in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Our analysis of these manuals indicated that pregnancy during this period was presented as a potentially dangerous affair that required constant surveillance by the self (and others) to ensure favourable pregnancy outcomes. A dominant theme that emerged from the manuals was that the expectant mother was morally responsible for mitigating a range of risk factors, including adequate exercise, sleep, fresh air, as well as for choosing an appropriate father and ensuring his health. At the same time, the manuals indicated that the failure to seek out expert advice and take up responsible practices was linked to adverse consequences for the expectant mother’s health, and her newborn’s health and moral character later in life. We conclude this article by discussing how findings from our historical data can provide an important context for understanding risk discourses around pregnancy as historically specific and culturally contingent, especially with respect to risks associated with maternal advanced age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine scientific and political controversies surrounding the assessment and management of environmental health risks from the substance Bisphenol A. The Government of Canada recently declared the substance toxic and implemented a ban of baby bottles containing Bisphenol A to reduce infant exposures despite objections from industry, some scientists and policy makers in other jurisdictions that the current weight-of-evidence does not justify these measures. Bisphenol A was reviewed under Canada's Chemicals Management Plan whereby the government is legally obligated to use a scientific weight-of-evidenceandprecautionary approach. However, tensions remain over how to distinguish and reconcile the two. We analysed peer review literatures, policy and legal documents, and key informant interview transcripts to determine evidence selection, contested claims and related efforts undertaken to have particular interpretations of weight-of-evidence and precaution legitimised. We discuss various factors within the Canadian context that influenced the trajectory of claims-making disputes, including how ‘weight-of-evidence’ and ‘precaution’ were employed. We advance understandings of why Canada became the first national government to declare Bisphenol A toxic, an internationally contentious, albeit increasingly precedent setting, policy response. We also identify the need for a better understanding of the science base of precautionary ideals and how uncertainty is normatively and factually negotiated with respect to harm, exposure and hazard matters. We argue improving regulatory deliberation requires enhancing the transparency and democratic scrutiny of expert-driven assessments given that the boundaries between that which is normative versus objective, technical versus political, scientific versus precautionary, are not always distinct or agreed upon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how genetic counsellors and clients account for evidence when explaining the familial cancer risk. Against the backdrop of scientific developments in genetics, which give rise to new knowledge about genes and genetic tests, there also prevail layers of uncertainty surrounding genetic test results vis-à-vis risk status. Formulation and assessment of evidence thus become a core communicative activity, especially when the evidence is inconclusive, whether based on genetic test results or patterns of family inheritance. Drawing upon transcripts of 26 tape-recorded cancer genetic counselling sessions in Norway, and following discourse analytic methodology, we specifically consider those explanations which are triggered by inconclusive evidence, hence engendering uncertainty. This analysis focuses on the kinds of evidence (e.g. direct vs. indirect) that are mobilised by the counsellors and the clients for specific purposes. We suggest that the counsellors’ cautious framing of evidence is twofold: firstly, it is geared towards management of uncertainty, that is acknowledging the inconclusive nature of current evidence and secondly, evidence-based explanations serve as justifications for future actions, including decisions about future tests in search for more credible evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the early 2000s the threat of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza captured the attention of the world's media. While China is often considered the epicentre of the panzootic, few studies have explored coverage of this variant of avian flu in China. To address this issue, the authors examined the portrayal of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza across four Chinese newspapers at the local and national level. A textual analysis was performed on 160 articles across an eight-year period from 2001–2008. The study approach drew from Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Representation Theory. The headline analysis showed the extent that risk of the disease was subverted by the depiction of a strong and efficient ‘China’ that was a global leader in the fight against the disease. Ideological referents were called upon to stress teamwork in confronting the crisis. The diachronic analysis illustrated how the relationship between commercial interests, science and public health risks played out within the Chinese media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The activity of risk communication in the healthcare setting is contingent upon the associated notions of uncertainty, normality and decision making. Focusing on the context of counselling for predictive genetic testing, we point out that because there is 'medical' uncertainty surrounding such testing, the discourse of risk assessment concerning an unwanted event is articulated in terms of the likelihood (in objective, probabilistic language) and the relative aversiveness (in subjective, evaluative language) of the different possible test results. Our data, taken from counselling clinics for Huntington's Disease and Familial Cancers (of the breast and colon), allow us to make a distinction between the risk that the genetic disorder will manifest (the 'risk of occurrence of disease') and the risk that might arise from undergoing genetic tests to clarify that risk (the 'risk of knowing'). In a given counselling session, both types of risk -- the strictly genetic risk of occurrence of disease, and the more contextual risk of 'knowing' -- become conflated, and in fact the risk of occurrence of disease is understood in the light of the other, external risk factors. We suggest the analytic notion of relativisation to capture this dynamics and go on to identify six discourse strategies that are used by participants, i.e., abstraction, reformulation, externalisation, localisation, temporalisation and agentivisation. Although it is not possible to determine the exact valency of these discourse strategies and plot them into a continuum, we argue that these strategy-types are selectively and cumulatively drawn upon by both counsellors and clients so as to escalate or de-escalate the risks under discussion. These manoeuvres serve as a way of managing the pragmatically informed decision-making process, while simultaneously attending to the relevant epistemological levels of uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]