Methods
The project applied an innovative combination of methods from the social sciences and humanities to a novel range of materials:
- Official inquiries – the project focused on the function of scientific expertise across the course of the crisis.
- Text was extracted from 155 pages of transcribed focus group discussions carried out in Bude, Cornwall in 2001 by the Centre for Environmental Risk at the University of East Anglia – discourse analysis was conducted.
- 55 hours of interviews with stakeholders were carried out (farmers, vets, scientists, policy makers, journalists, activists).
- Various cross-sections of national and local British newspaper output on FMD were analysed.
- We collected 453 poems from the internet and other collections.
Results
How knowledges interacted
In relation to the research question, this part of the project established:
- the importance of the deficit model constructed within rhetorical lay sociologies of the cause and course of the disease;
- that rumours played an important function in making sense of the crisis at all levels, from lay people to policy makers and that they contributed strongly the construction of communities; these communities were not only drawn upon as sources of strength, but as constructed identities used to legitimise and challenge official policy;
- the significance of historical processes of commensuration (explaining one object in terms of another) which meant that ethical and value decisions upon which foot and mouth policy rested were obscured behind appeals for decisions to be made only on the basis of the ‘best available science’.
Cultural framings of texts about disease and farming
In relation to the project’s main aim, this part of the project established:
- that militaristic rhetoric functioned in the national media during the FMD outbreak to justify drastic solutions, exculpate government from responsibility and focus on a rigorous mode of operation;
- that poems expressed not only emotions but also the tension between the increasing stresses arising from modern farming and the hankering after a farming past that is no longer there;
- that, although based on the questionable premise that FMD was caused by intensive agriculture and ultimately ‘cheap food’, the media debate about FMD and cheap food might have contributed to a rethink (by policy makers, journalists, NGOs and some consumers) of current agricultural practices;
- that a shift occurred in cultural models and metaphors in the UK media reporting of quantitative epidemiological modelling between February and July 2001 - from conceptualising modellers as detectives and models as mapping tools to modellers as liars and models as tools to distort the truth, indicating a shift from seeing models as a legitimate and ‘objective’ basis used by decision makers to pursue science-based policies towards seeing models as tools used to legitimise increasingly difficult political decisions;
- that children in rural areas were stressed by the events in the countryside, but that this stress was exacerbated by a feeling that urban children did not understand what ‘living on a farm’ meant.
Academic achievements
The project has contributed to knowledge of how various publics understand science, the interaction between language and policy in the media and the clash between poetry and policy as differing but important knowledge devices for the management of future outbreaks.
7 peer-reviewed articles are in print, 2 in press, 3 submitted, 2 in preparation.
Additionally, Dr Brigitte Nerlich and Dr Martin Döring are editing a book on the social and cultural aspects of the FMD crisis with Manchester University Press.
Dissemination activities
Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop:
October 7, 2003, Nottingham, conference to explore the social and cultural impact of FMD. The diverse range of people who attended sparked a lively and productive exchange of ideas. Further contacts emerged including those for interview.
November 19, 2004, Nottingham, Workshop to discuss the relation between scientific modelling and a lay sociology of modelling. Delegates attended from the USA, Europe, as well as universities in the UK, including Imperial College, the London School of Economics and Manchester University.
Newspapers
Our project and the ESRC had coverage in 25 different regional newspapers.
Radio
Laurie Taylor interviewed Dr Nerlich for BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, broadcast 11/05/05
Presentations
Members of the project team have presented findings in different venues throughout the UK and Europe.
Recommendations for policy
The pervasive feeling of dispossession and loss, expressed in poems and interviews with farmers, needs to be addressed in an integrated agricultural and environmental policy. Only then can agriculture deemed to be ‘sustainable’. This has to start from a local/community level upwards, not the other way round. Surveys and statistics that are the daily bread of politicians and policy makers can only give insight into the ‘aggregate’, not into individual lived experience. Poems do and policy makers should read them alongside numerical ‘data’ of what is happening out there in the ‘real world’. This clearly affects the way we represent differing views in society. A first step would be to develop devices and means of representation which blend the best science available (aggregates) with data from the ‘real world’ (dynamics).
We agree with Alan Irwin who has argued that we need to develop an approach to scientific and policy decision-making that does not downgrade the expertise of ordinary people. This would require formal institutions to recognize knowledge assembled by lay people (in whatever form, from rumours to poems) and a commitment to engaging with problematic situations or conflict situations rather than trying to separate science from non-science.