Acts of the 23rd GNGTS Conference
Authors: Giuseppe Tipaldo, Renzo Carriero, Astrid Pizzo
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, part of a wider longitudinal study on science communication practices by Italian researchers 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 – discussing the main results of a CAWI survey on a sample of the Italian seismologist community from the INGV and the GNGTS.