Filter by author: Rod Lamberts

In May 2021, the World Health Organization announced a new naming system for SARS-CoV-2 variants intended to replace potentially stigmatising names referencing geographic locations. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to identify the names and frames present in Australian news media coverage before and after the new names were announced. Results demonstrate uptake of the new names but also indicate the potential for intended outcomes of de-stigmatisation to be compromised, particularly by persistent negative framing. These findings indicate that future health communication efforts might be strengthened by integrating disease naming considerations into ongoing public health preparedness efforts and support ongoing scholarly inquiry into naming and framing in news media communication.

Street art is visual art in public spaces — public art — created for public visibility. Street art addresses a massive and extremely diverse audience: everyone in a city. Using a case study approach, this article explores: 1) the extent to which science-inspired environmental street art can be considered a vehicle for science communication in less tangible science contexts and institutional settings — on the street — and 2) the strategies that street artists deploy to communicate their environmental messages through large-scale painted murals. This article clarifies how street art can be understood as a means of creative grassroots environmental communication. It shows that, and how, street art can encourage agency in pro-environmentalism and help to develop our relationship with sustainability.

Katarzyna Kopecka-Piech and Bartłomiej Łódzki’s edited volume, The Covid-19 Pandemic as a Challenge for Media and Communication Studies, could be of great utility to science communication scholars and teachers. The studies with contained within it address two overarching research questions. First, how have media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe? Second, how were media and communication studied effectively through that period? The volume features 17 individual studies calling on myriad methods and case examples. This diversity of approaches allows the editors to also address an important, implicit third question. In essence: what has it been like to conduct worthwhile, meaningful, and robust research under such unusual and extreme global circumstances? Each chapter is thorough, detailed and of a high technical standard. This is a book that would likely best serve experienced readers more than novices. The entire compendium bears clear witness to the dynamic nature of social research playing out against a context of enormous global instability.

As COVID-19 continues its devastating pathway across the world, in this second part of the JCOM special issue on communicating COVID-19 and coronavirus we present further research papers and practice insights from across the world that look at specific national challenges, the issue of “fake news” and the possibilities of satire and humour in communicating the seriousness of the deadly disease.

The devastating effects of COVID-19 and the speed of both the scientific and medical response and the public information requirements about frontline healthcare work, medical advances and policy and compliance measures has necessitated an intensity of science communication never seen before. This JCOM special issue — the first of two parts — looks at the challenges of communicating COVID-19 and coronavirus in the early spread of the disease in 2020. Here we present papers from across the world that demonstrate the scale of this challenge.

This article provides a starting position and scene-setter for an invited commentary series on science communication and public intellectualism. It begins by briefly considering what intellectualism and public intellectualism are, before discussing their relationship with science communication, especially in academia. It ends with a call to science communication academics and practitioners to either become more active in challenging the status quo, or to help support those who wish to by engendering a professional environment that encourages risk-taking and speaking-out in public about critical social issues.