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PP 394
Public Engagement and Media Representations of Science: DNA Profiling Between Facts and Uncertainty
M.M. Roslyng
1
1
Aalborg University, Department of Communication, Copenhagen S, Denmark
The development of technologies in the bio-medical area have lead to new possibilities of predicting future predicaments via DNA profiling. One such
initiative from the local Danish Association of Municipalities, entitled Personal Medicine, propose to map the DNA of, initially, 100.000 Danes and, even‑
tually, the entire population. While the debates in the public domain thus far have emphasised the usefulness of this endeavour, critical considerations on
the possible social and ethical consequences have been far fewer. As a biopolitical tool, the possibilities provided by such techniques to know, govern and
control the population, of course, seem endless (Foucault, 2008; Rose, 2007). The media play an important role in this process not just as disseminator
of information about new technologies. The media is also backdrop for a public engagement with the issue, which must play an important role in any
forms of technologies of self in relation to DNA profiling. This paper sets out to examine how new biomedical technologies are represented in the media
in a way that influences citizens engagement which science as well as the ways in which knowledge about health and illness is debated, negotiated and
contested in the public domain. The question of how technologies and science are (re-)presented and discussed in the public domain has, generally, been
dealt with as a gap between expert and lay perceptions of technology (eg. Irwin &Wynne, 1996). These conceptualisations often rely on an understanding
of the public sphere as something ‘out there’, which can be grasped and understood as a whole. The paper argues, that if public engagement is to have any
form of critical political agency, it must be seen as more than an expression of a unitary public sphere as well as more than a mere technology of self in
a biopolitical sense. The theoretical agument of the paper is supported by a qualitative study of media representations of facts as well as opinions about
DNA profiling in the Danish broadsheet media. The study includes written news items which contain the words‘DNA profile’from all national newspapers in
the period 01.01.14 –01.02.16. In total 198 news items are systematically analysed using N-vivo. Based on this material, the paper leads to the argument
that the quest for (certain) knowledge is at the same time eagerly anticipated and stimulated in media representations. However, at the same time DNA
technologies hold an inevitably undecidable dimension which (critical) media also engages with. This juxtaposition between the processes of finding facts
and dealing critically with uncertainty, is key to understanding how citizens and patients engage with the promise of new technologies. References Fou‑
cault, M. (2008). The birth of the clinic: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Irwin, A. &Wynne, B. (eds) (1996). Mis‑
understanding Science? The Public Reconstruction of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (2007). The Politics of Life
Itself. Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.