13 de mayo de 2020

*CFP* "COMMUNICATION AND SOCIO-SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSIES IN HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT", VOLUME 14, ISSUE 2 (JUL-DEC 2021), ANUARIO ELECTRÓNICO DE ESTUDIOS EN COMUNICACIÓN SOCIAL "DISERTACIONES"


The modern promise that science and technology would lead us to an unlimited development has been tensioned by the new technologies of information, the ICTs. The changes in the relationship between experts and citizens show that tension and the socio-scientific controversies in the field of scientific-technological research are now the study objects in scientific-technological, health, and environmental research.

It has been more than fifteen years since the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva in 2003, where the representatives of the member States of United Nations announced the foundation of a society based on the exchange of knowledge, in which the multiplication of the information networks, digital literacy and the promised end of the digital divide would be the definitive factors to defeat poverty and ignorance.

The unlucky prophecy predicted something else than broken promises. The ambivalence of the so-called information and knowledge society is clearly shown in the fact that, on the one side, the global horizons grow, communications speed up and more sophisticated technical devices are produced, but on the other, citizens have more tools to question them. We encounter citizens that criticize, resist and actively look for new forms of participation or generation of knowledge when they face the scientific and technological developments that affect them.

In a hyper-informed world, in which the once legitimate production of knowledge and the institutional figure of the expert is continuously questioned, (re)generating new and legitimate voices that dispute the formerly exclusive fields of knowledge, it becomes central to ask not only about the access to information, but also about its uses for decision-making and in the different forms of citizen participation.

The Public Communication of Science and Technology in controversies about scientific-technical developments in health or the environment is a privileged space to observe these disputed fields. The appearance of actors whose legitimacy does not come from the conventional validation mechanisms and the voices of different rationalities in the diverse communicational spaces come together in public debates where it is not only pertinent to question legitimacy, but also the positioning, the links and participation of citizens.

In this call for papers, the Anuario Electrónico de Estudios en Comunicación Social “Disertaciones” looks for original papers dealing with socio-scientific/socio-technological controversies in the fields of health and environment. This refers (not exclusively) to:

  • Socio-scientific controversies 
  • Public Communication of Science and Technology models 
  • Sustainable development 
  • Social communication health campaigns 
  • Circulation and appropriation of knowledge: non-professional expert citizens
  • Environmental debates and sacrifice zones 
  • Big development project in protected territories 
  • The voices of experts 
  • Communication and citizen participation



The studies about socio-scientific and socio-technological controversies, especially in health and environment, have been great mines for knowledge production, particularly from the perspective of the Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS). However, this line of work has only partially penetrated in the field of communication studies, especially in the Latin-American context. The Public Communication of Science and Technology models (deficit, dialogue and participative) have drawn a line in which there is an undoubted need of further digging, especially with empiric research. This volume of the Disertaciones academic journal seeks to help researchers from different disciplines, but with a particular focus in the field of communication, to keep contributing in this direction.

Deadline: September 15, 2020.

Coordinated by Verónica Rocamora (veronica.rocamora@usach.cl) y Claudio Broitman (claudio.broitman@usach.cl), of the Santiago de Chile University.

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