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RISK AND HEALTH COMMUNICATION IN AN EVOLVING MEDIA ENVIRONMENT

Broadcast media has a particular fascination with stories that involve risk and health crisis events—disease outbreaks, terrorist acts, and natural disasters—contexts where risk and health communication play a critical role. An evolving media landscape introduces both challenges and opportunities for using communication to manage extreme events and hazardous contexts.

Risk and Health Communication in an Evolving Media Environment addresses issues of risk and health communication with a collection of chapters that reflect state-of-the-art discussion by top scholars in the field. The authors in this volume develop unique and insightful perspectives by employing the best available research on topics such as brand awareness in healthcare communication, occupational safety, climate change communication, local broadcasts of weather emergencies, terrorism, and the Ebola outbreak, among many other areas. It features analysis of new and traditional media that connects disasters, crises, risks, and public policy issues into a coherent fabric. This book bridges a substantial, but sometimes disconnected body of literature, and by doing so asks how contexts related to risk and health communication are best approached, how researchers balance scientific findings with cultural issues, and how scholars study an increasingly media-savvy society with traditional research methods.

H. Dan O’Hair is Dean of the College of Communication and Information and Professor of Communication at the University of Kentucky. He received his PhD in communication from the University of Oklahoma. In 2006, he served as the president of the National Communication Association, the world’s largest and oldest professional association devoted to the study of communication. He has published over 100 research articles and scholarly chapters in risk and health communication, media management, and psychology journals and volumes, and has authored and edited 18 books in the areas of communication, risk management, health, and terrorism. He has been the principal investigator or Co-PI for several grants from business, nonprofit, and government institutions totaling more than $11 million. O’Hair has served on the editorial boards of over 30 research journals and is a past editor of the Journal of Applied Communication Research. In April 2013, he was honored by the Broadcast Education Association with their Lifetime Achievement Award for Scholarship.