170
Reproducing Knowledge: Media and Social Representations
Abstract Submissions Closed
RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)
Language: French and English
Session Type: Oral
Over the last five decades environmental health researchers have produced extensive knowledge about the impact of toxicant exposure on human health. However, as Phil Brown et al. (2001) and others have shown for print media, such information rarely makes its way into mainstream depictions of disease, which tend to depict disease in biologically reductionist terms that obscures the role of environmental pollution.
This glaring discrepancy has important social implications. On the one hand, obscuring the health-damaging effects of pollution shields pollution producers and the politicians who support them. On the other, concealing the information prevents workers and those living near pollution production to protect themselves, thereby condemning them to higher rates of disease and shorter lives. These problems underscore the significant connection between knowledge and power.
This session is geared towards building on Brown et al.’s (2001) ground-breaking work. Towards that end, we invite papers that consider other influential agents who produce pollution-obscuring depictions of disease (such as governments, the medical profession, non-profit patient support groups, etc.), the social processes through which they continue to produce individualizing disease discourses, the contextual, cultural and structural factors that enable them to do so, the unequal impact of the problem, and/or what is being done to address this social problem.