Abstract
Biosecurity and quarantine laws operate internationally to protect national and state borders from potential threats to human and animal health, the environment, agriculture, and trade. This chapter explores how risk is communicated within biosecurity contexts through a discourse analysis of public communication texts from a federal government agency responsible for biosecurity in Australia. An overview of the relatively new policy concept of biosecurity is provided, suggesting some complexity in terms of how the concept is communicated by public agencies and, in turn, how it might be understood by the public. The analysis provided by this study points to similarities in the way that biosecurity discourse conflates risk with activities that are associated with (but are not actually the ‘real’) risk source, while adopting fundamentally different conceptualisations of risk itself, and different levels of agency onto members of the public in negotiating those risks. The difference in the ways that risk is communicated by these texts suggests that the task of gaining community awareness of biosecurity issues may be complicated by apparently contradictory public messages relating to biosecurity risks, which has implications for how messages that target personal responses to manage public risks are communicated by agencies internationally.
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© 2016 Sue McKell and Paul De Barro
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McKell, S., De Barro, P. (2016). Between Two Absolutes Lies Risk: Risk Communication in Biosecurity Discourse. In: Crichton, J., Candlin, C.N., Firkins, A.S. (eds) Communicating Risk. Communicating in Professions and Organizations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478788_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478788_14
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