Year: 2021
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Naming without shaming: A virus communication conundrum
We have all heard about the Kent strain of the coronavirus, or the UK or English strain for that matter, or the South African strain, or the Brazilian strain, not to forget the despicable references to the China or Wuhan virus by a former president of the United States. It’s good that we know about…
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Science Communication Research: Past Patterns and Future Perspectives
This post was first published by Alexander Gerber on the Public Understanding of Science Blog on 7 January 2021. It is cross-posted here with permission. This post provides an overview of a book Alex and his team recently published (open access) entitled Science Communication Research: An empirical field analysis. *** Just like other research fields…
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Mutation, vaccination, communication
It is extremely difficult to keep up with pandemic news at the moment. We are now a year into the Covid-19 pandemic and instead of just running away from the virus through social distancing, we are now engaging in a race with it through vaccination. Whether we will win the race depends on how many…
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Vaccines: Between hope and hesitancy
I was listening to the BBC Today programme on Saturday morning (30 January, 2020), becoming rather depressed about the current vaccine row, when I heard Nick Robinson talk about something I had wondered about: the absence of happy vaccination cards – a real gap in the greeting cards market. I had used an online card…
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Lockdown fatigue: A tale of two discourses
A while ago I wrote a brief post on ‘lockdown words’, amongst them ‘lockdown fatigue’. At the time I hadn’t noticed all the other quasi-synonyms, apart from ‘lockdown lethargy’. Over time more words crept past my horizon: behavioural fatigue, pandemic fatigue, isolation fatigue, quarantine fatigue and so on. In the UK, we are now in…
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Science, Technology & Culture: In memory of Christopher Johnson (1958-2017)
Almost 20 years ago, I was working at the Institute for Science and Society located in the Law and Social Sciences Building (then called the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society). I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I must have come across somebody telling me that people were establishing a…
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