GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

Sciencequake: A survey on the Italian seismologists community about the case of the Italian scientists conviction for the earthquake in L’Aquila G. Tipaldo 1 , R. Carriero 1 , A. Pizzo 1,2 1 Department of Culture, Politics and Society, University of Turin, Italy 2 Centro Interuniversitario Agorà Scienza, Turin, Italy Introduction. On 22 October 2012 the court of L’Aquila (Italy) sentenced to six years in prison six members of the “Commissione Grandi Rischi” (CGR, National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, an official government body), founding them guilty of multiple manslaughter for having falsely reassured citizens five days before the devastating earthquake of 2009, which claimed more than 300 lives. This paper, as part of a wider study on Italian researchers’ science communication practices initiated in 2012 by the University of Turin (ISAAC - Italian Scientists multi-technique Auditing and Analysis on science Communication ), will take the story of L’Aquila as a “revelatory” case study (Yin, 2003), uncovering the complex communicative interactions that today increasingly bind Science, Politics, Media and Society in risk assessment and uncertainty management. After proposing a theoretical model of interaction between the components mentioned above, the paper focuses mostly on the first of it – Science – presenting the main results of a CAWI (computer assisted web interview) survey on a sample of the Italian seismologists community from INGV and GNGTS. The L’Aquila earthquake trial as a ‘revelatory’ case. We aim to use the L’Aquila earth- quake trial – which lasted from September 2011 until October 2012 – as a ‘revelatory case’ of the deep and intricate relationships between Science (SC), Pseudoscience (PS), Politics (PO), Mass Media (MM) and Society (SO). Fig. 1 shows a sketchy representation of the general framework within which we placed our work: the model is inspired by the so called «mediatization» model of political communication (Mazzoleni and Schulz, 1999). The «mediatization» model recognizes that the media have become «themost salient arena» (Dahlgren, 1995) for discussing relevant issues in contemporary democracies, providing a stage for «political plays» and simultaneously interacting with both politics and society, not rarely offering contents deeply affected by populism (Mazzoleni et al. , 2003). According to our case study, we introduced two extra elements, Sci- ence (SC) and Pseudoscience (PS), the latter being conceived of as an en- demic component of the social or the political system or both (depending on circumstances), that acquires public visibility and a certain degree of le- gitimacy whenever it enters the media arena. Due to space limits, this work will be focusing only on one of the five components leaving the others – and their reciprocal interactions – to forth- coming updates. At least five reasons can be adduced to justify the choice. Fig. 1 – A model of mutual relationships between Science, Politics, Media and Society. 134 GNGTS 2013 S essione 1.1