The question of whether to cull wild badgers in order to control the spread of bovine TB (bTB) in UK cattle herds has been deeply contentious for nearly 40 years, and still shows no sign of resolution. This paper will examine the strategic framing of badgers in recent debates over bTB in the UK media, which take two opposing forms: the 'good badger' as epitomised in Kenneth Grahame's children's novel 'The Wind in the Willows'; and the less familiar 'bad badger': carnivore, digger, and carrier of disease. It will then uncover the deeper historical and cultural roots of these representations, to argue that underlying the contemporary 'badger/bTB' controversy is an older 'badger debate' about the proper relationship between these wild animals and humans. Finally, the implications of this finding for current debates over bTB policy will be explored.
This paper explores the phenomena of public scientific debates, where scientific controversies are argued out in public fora such as the mass media, using the case of popular evolutionary psychology in the UK of the 1990s. An earlier quantitative analysis of the UK press coverage of the subject (Cassidy, 2005) suggested that academics associated with evolutionary psychology had been unusually active in the media at that time, particularly in association with the publication of popular science books on the subject. Previous research by Turner (1980), Gieryn (1983), and Bucchi (1996) has established the relationship between such appeals to the public domain and the establishment of scientific legitimacy and academic disciplinary boundaries. Following this work, I argue here that popular science has in this case provided a creative space for scientists, outside of the constraints of ordinary academic discourse, allowing them to reach across scientific boundaries in order to claim expertise in the study of human beings.
This paper presents findings from quantitative analyses of UK press and print media coverage of evolutionary psychology during the 1990s. It argues that evolutionary psychology presents an interesting case for studies of science in the media in several different ways. Firstly, press coverage of evolutionary psychology was found to be closely linked with the publications of popular books on the subject. Secondly, when compared to coverage of other subjects, a higher proportion of academics and authors wrote about evolutionary psychology in the press, contributing to the development of a scientific controversy in the public domain. Finally, it was found that evolutionary psychology coverage appeared in different areas of the daily press, and was rarely written about by specialist science journalists. The possible reasons for these features are then explored, including the boom in popular science publishing during the 1990s, evolutionary psychology's status as a new subject of study and discussion, and the nature of the subject itself as theoretically based and with a human, 'everyday' subject matter.
On June 7 th , 2010, media reports appeared that nine month old twins living in East London had been rushed to hospital following a 'suspected fox attack': the babies had been seriously injured. This story received sustained and intense coverage for several months, and became the focus of debate over the role and behaviour of urban foxes, and how they and humans should coexist. Using textual analysis to unravel the various discourses surrounding this moment, this paper discusses how this incident became such a prominent 'media event'. Alongside the more immediate contexts of the 'silly season' and a period of political transition, we argue that this incident breached a series of spatial boundaries that many societies draw between people and the 'natural world', from the 'safest space' of a child's cot, to the categorisations made of animals themselves. We discuss the consequences of such boundary breaches, including confusion over the assignment of responsibility for, and expertise about, the figure of the 'urban fox'.
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