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Risk, Media and Stigma: Understanding Public Challenges to Modern Science and Technology
Edited by James Flynn, Paul Slovic and Howard Kunreuther
The benefits of modern technology often involve risks that produce public suspicion of, and aversion to, innovations.
Amplified by the pervasive power of the media, public concern about health and ecological risks can develop into a new and very significant social phenomenon, ‘technological stigma.’ The resulting aversions can produce enormous economic impacts and social consequences, such as those experienced in recent years with British beef, nuclear power, and genetically modified plants and cloning.
This volume, edited by three world authorities in the field, presents the current and most comprehensive examination of how and why stigmatization occurs, and what the appropriate responses to it should be.
Stigma can attach to places, such as transport routes for nuclear waste or toxic waste incinerators; to products, such as foods or the blood supply; to industries, such as those dealing with radioactivity; or to applied sciences such as biotechnology.
Contents: Part I - Introduction, Part II - Contamination Stigma, Part III - Nuclear Stigma, Part IV - Place, Product and Industry Stigma, Part V - Risk, Media and Stigma, Part VI - Coping with Stigma, Bibliography on Risk and Stigma
Contributors: G. Adams, J. Blair, R. Cantor, J. Chalmers, P. Chan, D. Easterling, M. Edelstein, B. Fischhoff, J. Flynn, G. Gesell, J. Graham, R. Gregory, S. Guhathakurta, W. Hunsperger, H. C. Jenkins-Smith, N. Jhaveri, J. X. Kasperson, R. E. Kasperson, N. Kraus, H. Kunreuther, M. Layman, S. Lebiednik, W. Leiss, R. Long, C. K. Mertz, M. L. Mitchell, E. Peters, D. Pijawka, D. Powell, P. Rozin, T. Satterfield, P. Slovic, V. Walker.
320 pages
Available from the publisher at www.earthscan.co.uk