Abstract
It is widely recognized that fracking is a topic of debate in the news, which is largely “compartmentalized” into stories on fracking as economically beneficial or risky to environment and health. Building on previous scholarship, we take a constructivist position and focus on fracking as potentially technical and social, or sociotechnical. Our qualitative textual analysis of news printed in two high-circulation newspapers in Canada (2013-2015) reveals that normative positions on fracking are furthered alongside normative descriptions of Indigenous Peoples and regional cultures. We argue that science communication practitioners perform specific normative work via their communicative acts.
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