Rebirth, Devastation and Sickness: Analyzing the Role of Metaphor in Media Discourses of Nuclear Power

Abstract

Nuclear power plays an important but controversial role in policies to ensure domestic energy security, fuel poverty reduction and the mitigation of climate change. Our article construes the problem of nuclear power in terms of social discourse, language and public choice; specifically examining the role that metaphors play in the policy domain. We empirically analyze metaphors as framing devices in nuclear energy policy debates in the UK between April 2009 and March 2013, thereby capturing the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. We employ documentary analysis of major UK national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, using electronic bibliographic tools to extract the metaphors. We then map these metaphors using a Type Hierarchy Analysis, which examines how elements of the target domain (energy technologies and policies) originate from a different source domain. Type hierarchies identify and categorize metaphors, defining the affectual and emotional responses associated with them, providing us with grounded insight into their role in shaping discourse and as a consequence influence public engagement with energy policy. Our analysis highlights three emergent domains of discourse metaphors and discusses the implications of their deployment. Metaphors were found to be classified into three different categories: Rebirth (Renaissance), Devastation (Apocalypse, Inferno, Genie and Bomb) and Sickness (Addiction and Smoking). ARTICLE HISTORY

Using Visual Impact Metaphors to Stimulate Environmentally Friendly Behavior: The Roles of Response Efficacy and Evaluative Persuasion Knowledge

“…Whereas the usage of environmental metaphors, for example in newspapers, is relatively well studied (e.g. Karlsson, 2016;Moore & Moore, 2013;Nerlich et al, 2010;Princen, 2010;Renzi, Cotton, Napolitano, & Barkemeyer, 2017;Thibodeau et al, 2017), the effects of such metaphors on environmentally friendly behaviors is less well investigated. A notable exception is a study showing that reading a newspaper article using a "war" metaphor (fighting a war against climate change) led to a higher willingness to change behaviors in order to mitigate climate change effects than an article without a metaphor (Flusberg et al, 2017although the "climate change as a 'race' metaphor" had no effect).…”

Fracking and metaphor: Analysing newspaper discourse in the USA, Australia and the United Kingdom

“…THA is a qualitative analysis of these semantic networks. In practice, our THA follows the protocol developed by Renzi and Napolitano (Renzi, 2009; see also Renzi et al, 2017;Renzi and Napolitano, 2011) to produce a series of Type Hierarchy directed graphs which display the mapping of the concept supertypes and subtypes. At the top of the TH graph diagrams, are the more general types: concepts that become more and more specialised as we follow the edges of the graphs downwards.…”

“…The use of specific metaphors in connection with a given topic creates a conceptual domain Ð a certain organization of human experiences. Different conceptual domains will organise experiences and shape our thoughts and language in different ways (Gibbs Jr, 2017;Ison et al, 2013;Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012;Renzi et al, 2017), their application in print and broadcast media thus influences the ways in which members of the public think, reason, reflect and gather further information on issues (Thibodeau and Boroditsky, 2011). We do not imply that certain metaphors ÒcauseÓ certain policies or actions, however, since metaphors play a prominent role in framing UHD, they contribute to our understanding of the technologies and its applications and thus influences how social actors respond to their implementation in society (e.g.…”

Conceptualisation of Sustainability

“…sis. An interesting study from Renzi et al (2017) focuses on the problem of nuclear power in social discourses, language, and public choice, and works with three categories in which metaphors can be classified, namely 'rebirth' (renaissance), 'devastation' (apocalypse, inferno, genie, and bomb) and 'sickness' (addiction). Additionally, Atanasova and Koteyko's study on conceptual metaphors points out their potential to communicate the urgency to act on climate change in two online newspapers (2015); the same was done in Grevsmühl's study on the 'ozone hole' metaphors (2018).…”