MyGlasgow News

Come and hear Professor John Tulloch Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Adam Smith Research Foundation give a short reflexive talk about the writing, publishing and personal/political/professional context and structure of his book (with Professor Warwick Blood), Icons of War and Terror: Media Images in an Age of International Risk. This talk will be followed by a reception.

As a close-up survivor of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, John Tulloch’s image, taken one hour after the blast near Edgeware Road tube station, became iconic – both in Britain and internationally – of the 7/7 event, and became prime, regularly published material, for major media corporations when dealing with terrorist security issues. In particular, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper published his image on its front page in November 2005 in support of Tony Blair’s 90-days without charge new terror bill – a bill which John Tulloch profoundly opposed. His response took him through the issues at the heart of the recent Leveson Inquiry, the weakness of the Press Complaints Commission, and the ethics and culture of Britain’s press today. Later he found out that his phone had been hacked by the News of the World.

How this media/political context generated a change in research direction for Tulloch, and what influence this had on the ‘subjective/objective’ framework of the Icons book will be discussed in the talk. But, as well, there is another politics built into the history and structure of this Icons book: the ‘market-driven’ ideology of international publishing, which led to the cancellation of the first version of the book, and its migration to Routledge. Finally, there is a further political context: that of risk sociology itself, the shift in its recent perspective from ‘expert’ to ‘lay’ knowledge accounts, from ‘objective-analytical’ to ‘subjective-experiential’ emphasis on lay heuristics.

Drawing on this theoretical move, and also risk theory’s discussion of different kinds of risk rationality, John Tulloch will discuss briefly his simultaneous immersion in both ‘case-management risk’ (as in his lengthy PTSD therapy) and ‘comprehensive risk management’ (at governmental and media level), and how this flowed through into both the Icons book and his media interviews after 7/7. 

The event on Tuesday 16^th April at 6-7.30pm in the Room 916, Adam Smith Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8RT.

Attendance is free but places are limited so booking is essential.

Register here: http://tulloch.eventbrite.co.uk

 

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First published: 11 April 2013