Defining, Assessing, and

The concept of risk is becoming an established focus of rhetorical scholars and critics. As was recently argued in the pages of this journal, “Research on the significance of affective forces in determining how people perceive risk … creates ample opportunities for rhetorical studies to complement social scientific research on cognition of risk ” (Schwartzman, Ross, and Berube, 2011, 1). Schwartzman et al. identified several issues that scholars might reflect on in developing a more “rhetoricized ” approach to risk. These include: 1) the inaccessibility of science to lay audiences; 2) the role of uncertainty in gaining and maintaining public trust; 3) the influence of speculation and sensationalism in diminishing the impact of scientific research; 4) the problem of both too little and too much information in times of crisis; 5) skepticism about experts; 6) the role of narrative in risk perception; and 7) audience differences in risk-related activities. Related to most of these issues is the role of technical obfuscation within risk-related controversies (Taylor et al., 2008)