ECREA16-Abstract

583

Saturday, November 12

1 6 : 0 0 – 1 7 : 3 0

SCI06

Environmental Communication

PP 703

Transmedia Communication as a Tool to Create and Consolidate a Community of Environmental Volunteers

C. Sánchez-Blanco

, B. León

Universidad de Navarra, School of Communication, Pamplona, Spain

Life + Respira is a research project whose main objective is to analyze and improve urban air quality. It takes place in the city of Pamplona (Spain), as

a pilot experience that later can be extrapolated to other cities. It started in June 2014 with funding from the Life + program of the European Union, with

an expected duration of three years.The research is carried out using a pollution sensors specially designed for the project, which are carried by a large group

of volunteers on their travels cycling around the city. The project is designed in such a way that citizens are key players in research, in addition to benefiting

from the results. It is therefore necessary to create and build a community around the project, which includes several audience groups: an interdisciplinary

team of 32 researchers; 150 volunteers (citizens of Pamplona), who participate in the research, transporting small pollution sensors on their bikes; and,

finally, the local community, specially ecologically aware people. The characteristics of the research and the way it is conducted make communication one

of the key elements of the project, since it is crucial to inform and raise awareness among the various target audiences. As a result, an ambitious transmedia

communication strategy has been designed and implemented, which includes more than one hundred actions, over the three years of research, developed

by an interdisciplinary team of specialists in environmental communication, advertising, marketing, social networking and audiovisual production, in which

the participation of the different audiences is essential and indispensable to achieve an effective communication. Since the volunteers are key players in

this project, the aim of the paper is to analyze the effectiveness of the transmedia communication campaign, which combines traditional and social media,

in order to build a community of environmental volunteers, who are engaged in the project and a play a fundamental role in the research. We explore to

what extent is a transmedia communication campaign effective to create a community of environmental volunteers, what types of communication actions

are more effective to create it and how do volunteers use conventional and social media to receive information and participate in the project. We have used

a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including a survey to the volunteers and a focus group. Preliminary results indicate that traditional

media are more effective to create the community, whereas volunteers find social media more useful for the consolidation stage, where engagement and

participation are key elements.

PP 704

Mediated Care Politics: (Un-)Certain Activism and Primate Research

E. Giraud

Keele University, Media- Communications and Culture, Newcastle-Under-Lyme, United Kingdom

This paper explores the entanglement of narratives of care and certainty, in a high profile controversy surrounding the construction of a new primate

laboratory at Oxford University (2003–2008). To examine these narratives, it combines conceptualisations of scientific uncertainty (as articulated within

science and technology studies, e.g. Star, 1985, 1987) with research from communications studies, which has focused on the relationship between activism,

mediation, and the construction of critical counter-narratives (e.g. Cammaerts, Mattoni and McCurdy; Ruiz, 2015). In doing so, the paper elaborates upon

recent work that has examined how uncertainties that seem routine for researchers can be used to support specific political and ethical ends (e.g. Hollin

and Pearce, 2015). The primate research controversy illustrates, however, that discourses of care can be used for similarly instrumental purposes. The paper

reconstructs dominant narratives surrounding the controversy into nonhuman primate research (NHP) in Oxford through a critical reading of sources that

include activist printed and web-based materials; ethnographic research with activist groups; research papers focused on primate care in this experimental

context; and mass media representations of the controversy (including 75 newspaper articles and a 2007 documentary, Monkeys, Rats and Me). Through

analysing these materials it explores how – as NHP research was articulated in different ways by the different actors involved – what emerged was not

a clear-cut dichotomy between appeals to emotion on the part of activists and appeals to scientific progress on the part of researchers. Instead groups si‑

multaneously drew specific ethical and physiological comparisons between species whilst contesting others. On the part of activists, for instance, NHPs were

both evoked as being of comparable moral standing to humans, and as too physiologically different for research to be effective. On the part of researchers,

moral differences and physiological similarities were emphasised. Yet these narratives were complicated by tactics wherein interlocutors on different ‘sides’

of the debate drew on tactics more commonly associated with their opposing partners. Care for laboratory animals was emphasised by researchers to

challenge activists’ ethics, whilst activists drew on peer-reviewed articles to made epistemic claims about uncertainties in neuroscience research. These

instrumental uses of care are especially significant in light of a recent body of work within science and technology studies to move from understanding

socio-political issues as ‘matters of concern’ (Latour, 2004) to ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). A caring approach to knowledge production,

from this perspective, can be generative of new forms of ethical responsibility. Through relating theories of care to the context of political activism, and

examining the mediation of care-narratives by different interlocutors, the paper complicates assertions about care’s ethical potentials. Care in this context,

does not guarantee new modes of responsibility but is leveraged to undergird political discourses with pre-defined ethical and epistemic commitments.