ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys a wide swath of recent risk and crisis communication scholarship in order to trace what might be termed broadly a “modernist” epistemology underlying present ways of thinking and communicating about risk. This survey therefore serves as a genealogy of contemporary epistemologies of risk. Taking the discourse about biological terrorism as a rhetorical archive especially relevant to American concerns about risks in the world today, the chapter explores the ways in which modernist epistemologies of risk manifest in risk and crisis communication about bioterrorism, in academic studies of that communication, as well as in their resulting recommendations for risk and crisis communication policy. It presents a rethinking of the rhetorical implications of risk and crisis communication, including but not limited to that addressed to the threat of biological terrorism, in the light of questions raised about the manner in which humans communicate knowledge about the world.
