Knowing Terror: On the Epistemology and Rhetoric of Risk

Abstract

Studies of risk and crisis communication differ in a multitude of ways, such as in the objects of danger to which they turn their attention, the types of audiences they analyze and, of course, in the theoretical and methodological frameworks that drive their analyses. Barbara Reynolds’ (2002) introductory training manual, Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication, developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, distinguishes among crisis communication, risk communication, and crisis and emergency risk communication according to several factors such as time pressure (ranging from anticipatory to urgent) and general purpose of the respective messages (pp. 5-6). Perhaps the most obvious distinction between risk and crisis communication derives from their relative relationship to the dangerous event. Risk communication tends to consider the probability of a dangerous phenomenon (e.g., disease, environmental harm, etc.) occurring and the magnitude of such an event in terms of its impact on something a community values. Crisis communication addresses a dangerous event in progress or after it has occurred, usually to manage institutional relations with the community and/or mitigate the harmful effects of the hazard (Reynolds & Seeger, 2005, pp. 46-47), what Heath and O’Hair refer to as “risk manifested” (chapter 1, this volume). Crisis and risk communication might thus be said to differ in terms of the ontological status of the hazardous event at issue, in terms of whether the danger is merely probabilistic or has actually come into Being.