Jonathan Crichton & Christopher N. Candlin 
Communicating Risk 

We live in world increasingly shaped by risk, a fact underscored by recent events in the financial markets, science and technology, environmental policy and biosecurity, law enforcement and criminal justice. Risk assessment has become a central concern of governments, organisations and the professions, and the communication of risk is a crucial part of professional work. Exploring how risk is discursively constructed across these domains is therefore central to our understanding of how professional practice affects people’s lives.
Communicating Risk takes up this challenge, with contributions from leading researchers and practitioners that examine key issues of risk communication across diverse professional domains.

Table of Content

1. Crucial Sites and Research Orientations: Exploring the Communication of Risk; Christopher N. Candlin, Jonathan Crichton and Arthur Firkins

PART I: COMMUNICATING RISK IN HEALTHCARE

2. Risk and Clinical Incident Disclosure: Navigating between Morality and Liability; Rick Iedema, Donella Piper, Katja Beitat, Suellen Allen, Kate Bower and Suyin Hor

3. ‘Being Diplomatic with the Truth’: The Discursive Management of Risk in Accounts of People Leaving Forensic Psychiatric Settings; Michael Coffey

4. Risk and Safety in Linguistic and Cultural Diversity: A Narrative Intervention in Residential Aged Care; Jonathan Crichton and Fiona O’Neill

5. Choice, Risk and Moral Judgement: Using Discourse Analysis to Identify the Moral Component of Midwives’ Discourses; Mandie Scamell and Andy Alaszewski

PART II: COMMUNICATING RISK IN LEGAL PROCESSES

6. Risk, Law and Security; Pat O’Malley

7. ‘Making a Raise’ and ‘Dusting the Feds’: Contextualising Constructions of Risk and Youth Crime; Joe Yates

PART III: COMMUNICATING RISK IN SOCIAL CARE

8. The Discourse of Risk in Youth Justice: A Numbers Game; Stephen Case

9. Working with Risk in Child Welfare Settings; Tony Stanley

PART IV: COMMUNICATING RISK IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND BIOSECURITY

10. Interpretive Environmental Risk Research: Affect, Discourses and Change; Karen L. Henwood and Nick Pidgeon

11. Social Risk, Relationships with Communities, and Corporate Culture; Philippe Hanna, Frank Vanclay and Jos Arts

12. How Structured Dialectical Discourse of Risk Eased Tension in North American LNG Siting Conflicts; Susan Mello

13. Framing Risk and Uncertainty in Social Science Articles on Climate Change, 1995-2012; Christopher Shaw, Iina Hellsten and Brigitte Nerlich

14. Between Two Absolutes Lies Risk: Risk Communication in Biosecurity Discourse; Sue Mc Kell and Paul De Barro

PART V: MEDIATING RISK

15. Negotiating Risk in Chinese and Australian Hard News Reporting on Food Safety: A Corpus-based Study; Changpeng Huan

16. The Uses of Biological Sciences to Justify the Risks of Children’s Mental Health and Developmental Disorders in North American Newsmagazines: 1990 to 2012; Juanne N. Clarke and Donya Mosleh

17. ‘It’s Just Statistics … I’m Kind of a Glass Half-full Sort of Guy’: The Challenge of Differing Doctor-Patient Perspectives in the Context of Electronically-mediated Cardiovascular Risk Management; Catherine O’Grady, Bindu Patel, Sally Candlin, Christopher N Candlin, David Peiris and Tim Usherwood

PART VI: REGULATING RISK

18. Central Banking in Risk Discourses: ‘Remaking the Economy After Crisis; Clea D Bourne

19. Projecting a Definition of Risk Situation: Travel Advice and the Prudent Traveller; Arthur S. Firkins and Christopher N. Candlin

20. Suicide Candy: Tracing the Discourse Itineraries of Food Risk; Rodney H. Jones

About the author

Jonathan Crichton is Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Member of the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures at the University of South Australia. His research focuses on the role of language in professional-lay interactions. He has published in a wide range of international journals and edited collections and is the author of The Discourse of Commercialization (2010), and co-editor, with Christopher N. Candlin, of Discourses of Deficit (2011) and Discourses of Trust (2013).Christopher N. Candlin was Senior Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences. His research and publications lie in the critical analysis of professional/institutional discourses. He was a member of the Editorial Boards of major international journals and co-edited, with Srikant Sarangi, the Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice. Recent publications include Discourses of Deficit (2011) and Discourses of Trust (2013) both co-edited with Jonathan Crichton.Arthur S. Firkins has had extensive involvement with risk communication in the public and private sectors. His doctoral research focused on the discursive framing of risk, he has co-authored recent papers with Christopher N. Candlin on the communication of risk in social care and currently works for BAE-Systems.