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Science Communication in Times of Crisis
This volume addresses demands on external and internal science communication in times of crisis. The contributions discuss present crises such as COVID-19 (e.g. vaccination campaigns or political reactions towards the pandemic in the context of science scepticism), and climate change (e.g. plausibility judgements or the role of scientists). They also relate their approaches to past crises, e.g. 9/11 or the Galileo affair. This volume is unique in that it is interdisciplinary from a theoretical and methodological perspective. In that respect, the authors apply concepts from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, rhetoric, news values analysis, pragmatics and terminology research to various types of data, such as newspaper headlines, Tweets, open letters, corpora or glossaries. The case studies are situated within different cultural contexts, with various languages being examined, i.e. Polish, Arabic, English, French, German, and Spanish. Elevating our understanding of the interface of science communication and crisis communication, this collection of articles proves valuable to scholars and students from linguistics, communication science, political science, sociology and philosophy of science.
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 96] 2022. vi, 222 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 18 July 2022
Published online on 18 July 2022
© John Benjamins
Table of Contents
- Chapter 1. Communicating science in crisis societies: Challenges across disciplines, contexts and nationsPascal Hohaus | pp. 1–14
- Chapter 2. Which facts to trust in the debate on climate change? On knowledge and plausibility in times of crisisMartin Böhnert and Paul Reszke | pp. 15–40
- Chapter 3. Letters to power: Authority appeals in the communication of scientific consensusCollin Syfert | pp. 41–64
- Chapter 4. Pivoting to support science communication in times of crisis: A case study of the Government of Canada’s Glossary on the COVID-19 pandemicLynne Bowker | pp. 65–90
- Chapter 5. COVID-19 neologisms between metaphor and culture: A multilingual corpus-based studyAmal Haddad Haddad | pp. 91–118
- Chapter 6. Persuasion in health communication: The case of Saudi and Australian tweets on COVID-19 vaccinationDina Abdel Salam El-Dakhs | pp. 119–142
- Chapter 7. Communicating risks of an Anti-COVID-19 vaccine in Poland: A comparative case study of content, style and advocacy of three media outletsKatarzyna Molek-Kozakowska and Sofiia Struchkova | pp. 143–168
- Chapter 8. ‘Coronavirus as a political weapon’: The COVID pandemic through the lens of the US Alt-Right MediaZeynep Cihan Koca-Helvacı | pp. 169–196
- Chapter 9. Science versus? The U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemicJohn M. Callahan and Robert Jensen | pp. 197–220
- Index | pp. 221–222
“There could hardly be a timelier title to match the current sense of global “crisis” on various levels — be it environmental, health and wellbeing, economic, and/or political — than that of this volume. It is the 96th title in the publisher’s series, Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture and it offers multidisciplinary perspectives on science communication, shedding light on the contemporary crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, and focusing on different cultural and linguistic settings. The book’s attention to discourse is a clear strength of the volume. [...] The volume certainly represents a valuable contribution to the field of science communication, and, if anything, indicates through its forays into specific and contextual aspects of discourse that much work remains to be done.”
Antoinette Fage-Butler, Aarhus University, on the Public Understanding of Science Blog.
“This volume is absolutely relevant, thought-provoking, and successful in reaching its aims. The novel, and refreshing approach allowed for an array of linguistic theories in many of the chapters to take center stage in the conversation. Many other purportedly multidisciplinary volumes do not allow for the rigorous and appropriate analysis of the very building blocks of communication, i.e., language and discourse. By contrast, this volume was a paradigm of inclusivity. Another merit of this volume was the logical organization and productive succession of topics and research. This allowed for the chapters to discursively intertwine, ultimately strengthening each argument. [...] Overall, this volume is a valuable resource to address the perennial topic of science communication in times of crisis; it will certainly be a seminal starting point for future studies in this domain.”
Sarah Clark, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, on Linguist List 35.224, 17 January 2024.
“Overall, incorporating case studies and representative practices from real-world contexts, this edited volume provides useful insights for readers to critically evaluate science information in times of crises, as well as find practical strategies and approaches in effective crisis communication.”
Yi Zhou, Central China Normal University, Language in Society 53:4 (2024).
Cited by (7)
Cited by seven other publications
Fage-Butler, Antoinette, Loni Ledderer & Kristian H. Nielsen
Hohaus, Pascal
Lennon, Joe, Wei-lun Lu, Xu Wen & Zoltan Kövecses
2025. Communicating the pandemic. In COVID-19 [Metaphor in Language, Cognition, and Communication, 11], ► pp. 1 ff.
Oliveira, Alandeom W., Adam Oliver Brown, Gabrielle Shao, Alysha Wenghofer, Amanda J. Zullo & Eduardo Navarro-Meza
Senn, Martin, Christian Schwaderer, Lore Hayek & Sarah C. Dingler
Berrocal, Martina
2024. Maintaining political authority and credibility during the Covid-19 crisis. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 119 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.