The death of scientific evidence in Canadian policymaking:

Controversy and collective resistance to perceived government ‘anti-science’

Authors

  • Graham Smart University of Ottawa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.32093

Keywords:

anti-science, deliberative democracy, discourse coalition, ideological representation, macro-argument, scientific controversy

Abstract

This study examines publicly voiced resistance by a Canada-wide community of scientists and citizen supporters against what they perceived as the Canadian government's efforts to undermine publicly supported science, with its concern for empirical evidence, in order to facilitate a narrowly pro-industry orientation in its policy-making. Using Hajer's argumentative discourse analysis (ADA) to interpret a corpus of some 700 Web-published texts, the author identified a macro-argument collectively produced and publicly communicated by the Canadian scientific community. The study also showed how this macro-argument served as a vehicle for two ideological representations: a virtuous self-representation of the scientific community itself and a negative representation of the motives and actions of the Canadian government. The findings of the research contribute to our understanding of how collective argumentative positions emerge within the discourse of a major scientific controversy. At the same time, the study offers policymakers insights in how they might communicate more effectively with communities of scientific experts.

Author Biography

  • Graham Smart, University of Ottawa

    Graham Smart is an Associate Professor in the School of Linguistics and Language Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has published research on writing in academic and workplace settings, including Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking. In more recent research on environmental discourse, he has been studying the discursive field co-created by various social groups as they construct and communicate arguments about the environment.

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Published

2018-12-31

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Smart, G. (2018). The death of scientific evidence in Canadian policymaking: : Controversy and collective resistance to perceived government ‘anti-science’. Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice, 13(1-3), 302-320. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.32093