OUTREACH

“Risk Communication can save lives”: Mercator Fellows invited panelists at the Open Research Forum on Risk and Crisis Communication of TU Ilmenau

On June 22^nd, the Mercator Fellows of the DECIPHER project were invited by TU Ilmenau’s vice-president to speak at the Open Research Forum on Risk and Crisis Communication on campus.

The panelists, well-known scholars from the US, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Italy, discussed good and bad practices, misinformation, regulation, policy-making and other topics regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises with the audience on-site and online.

Timothy Sellnow from the University of Central Florida in the US, gave an opening keynote on the theory and history of crisis communication as an academic discipline. Among other aspects, he underlined the crucial role of TU Ilmenau for developing and institutionalizing the field in Germany and Europe. He also stressed how important it is to conduct more cross-national and cross-cultural research on risk and crisis communication including more countries of the Global South.

Martin Löffelholz, Decipher Spokesperson and Chair of Media Studies at the Technische Universität Ilmenau, facilitated the panel. The panelists were Deanna Sellnow from the University of Central Florida, USA; Bengt Johansson of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Audra Diers- Lawson from Kristiania University College, Norway; Andreas Schwarz from Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany, and Fabiana Zollo from Ca’ Foscari University, Italy.

The panelists discussed, for example, how the pandemic was handled by governments and health institutions in countries like the UK, the US, Germany, Sweden, and Italy. They pointed to best and worst practices in risk and crisis communication and the main challenges in the respective countries during COVID-19. From there, they deduced important goals for the DECIPHER project, that besides analyzing COVID-related communication in seven countries aims at developing guidelines for more effective and ethical risk communication in the context of pandemics.

Dr. Deanna Sellnow raised the issue of how politicization and polarization of COVID-19 turned into a political issue and mentioned a few shortcomings of the media coverage that to some extent did not follow the guidelines in risk and crisis communication created by scholars in the field. Also, she highlighted how the pandemic forced higher education institutions to mature and improve their formats and contents of online teaching. Dr. Audra Diers-Lawson and Dr. Andreas Schwarz explained how DECIPHER will benefit from the comparison of seven countries and how the findings can be used to improve pandemic risk communication for minorities and immigrant groups. Dr. Fabiana Zollo talked about the so-called ‘infodemic’ and how computational methods can be used to get a better understanding of the role of social media during a public health crisis.

The panel was also open for questions and comments from the audience on-site and online. Many questions addressed further details of the DECIPHER project and how it might be extended in the future to include more countries and different methodological approaches. Finally, the Dr. Deanna Sellnow closed the panel with the concluding remark that “good risk communication is important to empower people and can save lives”.