This book explores the connections between risk and responsibilisation in official communication to the public about the global risks of the pandemic and climate change. Our media spheres in the 2020s have been saturated with information about what we should or should not be doing to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Although the ability of risk communication to ‘responsibilise’ the public is central to its functioning in our societies, this aspect has so far been under-investigated in academia. To address this lacuna, Antoinette Fage-Butler develops a discursive approach to risk communication that focuses on the values that are communicated in risk messages. Examples of official risk communication about the pandemic and climate change from national and transnational contexts are analysed and compared, leading to new empirical findings and theoretical insights about the nature of risk and responsibilisation. Fage-Butler also builds on recent stirrings in the evolving field of risk communication that highlight the importance of cultural and value-related factors. Overall, this book will equip researchers with an approach to risk communication that reflects the complexity of today’s global risk challenges. Risk and Responsibilisation in Public Communication will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk communication, public health and environmental studies.

This collection elaborates an innovative analytical framework for knowledge communication, bringing together insights from a range of professional settings to highlight how a cross-disciplinary approach can promote a new view of knowledge that emphasizes constructivist and cognitivist perspectives. The volume seeks to draw connections between different disciplines’ traditionally disparate studies of knowledge communication, defined here as the communication of domain knowledge between experts of the same discipline, experts of different disciplines, or non-experts with an interest in developing expert knowledge. Featuring work from scholars across linguistics, corporate communication, and sociology on diverse professional environments, chapters focus on one of three central aspects in the communication of expert knowledge: the textual carrier of the interaction, the roles and relationships between parties in these interactions, and the contexts in which the texts and communication occur. Taken together, the collection elucidates the value of an approach that supposes that expertise is co-created in interaction under the conditions of human cognitive systems and that knowledge asymmetries can offer both challenges and opportunities to better understand and generate new forms of communication and specialized knowledge. This book will be of interest to scholars interested in language and communication, professional communication, organizational communication, and sociology of knowledge.