GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

Firstly, the idea that a scientist could be prosecuted because of his/her scientific work, in ad- vanced democracies, was something more suitable for history books than today’s life. Not by chance, at least in the immediacy of the sentence, the media and not a few members of the Italian and international scientific communities spread the idea that the Italian scientists con- viction was an attack on science, following the then Minister of Environment Corrado Clini, who claimed that the sentence had a sole precedent in trial held by the Catholic Church against Galileo Galilei in 1633. This case – to move to the second reason – perfectly fits into the STS international debate on scientists’ competencies when engaging with the public, pushing the discussion forward on key-points still not developed as much as it should be: how scientists think of their own role in risk assessment and emergency management, not excluding possible ethical implications; and how they represent the unavoidable – but sometimes “dangerous” – liaisons with politics in relevant decision-making processes. This is a crucial point in contemporary democracies, as Nature (2012) put down founding the verdict “perverse” and the sentence “ludicrous”, worried about the serious implications «about the chilling effect on (scientists’) ability to serve in public risk assessments». A third point is about science, media and pseudoscience: an increasingly relevant twist of interests and communication strategies, which in the L’Aquila case is so sharp to be almost paradigmatic, gives the opportunity, for example, to explore whether and how Italian seismologists cope with a media logic (i.e. spectacularization and trivialization of information) keen on giving equal space to scientists and pseudoscientists (as defined just beyond), in a sort of « par condicio » or «equalization of positions» strategy of communication. Lastly, we think it may argue for the sociological relevance of the study to survey for the first time the Italian seismologist community, the most directly affected scientific body by the quake in L’Aquila and what ensued. Before moving to methods and results, it is important to underline that the five spheres composing our model are not to be intended as abstract categories. On the contrary, they precisely enclose specific social actors directly involved in the L’Aquila case. When we talk about MM, we refer to the huge video-textual documentation newspapers and televisions have produced over these years at a local, national and – not rarely – international level. By PO, we firstly and mostly intend the Italian Civil Protection and the CGR, whose members played a major role in assessing risk and managing the emergency in L’Aquila before, during and after the tragic earthquake of 6 April 2009. With SO we both refer to the Italian public opinion in general and to the citizens of L’Aquila, who more than everyone else have suffered the heavy consequences of the earthquake and a part of whom constituted as offended party kicking off trial against PO and SC. The “umbrella term” SC has in this paper quite a delimited semantic domain: it’s the Italian seismologists community, where the six scientists sentenced came from. And PS is for us represented by the key-figure of Gioacchino Giuliani, a former technician of the Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space detached to the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso. Giuliani made headlines by claiming to have predicted the disaster of April 6, 2009 with a radon detector. Yet, his profile is unfit to be represented as «experts» or «scientists» in seismology under many points of view: not appropriate CV, nor adequate academic qualifications, not belong to relevant research programs, list of publications without relevant peer-reviewed material. Data and methods. Our data come from an online survey of 379 Italian researchers (from University, CNR, INGV and other research institutes) conducted in June 2013. 1 To reach the target population of Italian seismologists we used two email lists: GNGTS and INGV. From the former we deleted all the email addresses with an INGV account in order to avoid 1 This case study is part of a larger project (ISAAC) about science communication coordinated by prof. Sergio Scamuzzi at the Department of Cultures, Politics and Society, University of Torino. 135 GNGTS 2013 S essione 1.1