With the support of NeFCA and its Health Communication division, Ghent University’s ‘Health, Media & Society’ research group invited Prof. Charles L. Briggs (University of California, Berkeley) and Prof. Daniel C. Hallin (University of California, San Diego) to give a talk about their latest groundbreaking work ‘Making Health Public’ (2016) on the complex relations between the media, society and health news.

The lecture ‘Mediatizing Biosecurity: Journalists, Public Health Officials and the Co-Production of Pandemics’ focused on the fundamental role of health news coverage in our understanding of health and illness in contemporary society. Briggs and Hallin demonstrated how health knowledge is produced through the entwinement of a highly varied and ever expanding field of health experts. After the lecture, a lively and interactive round-table with the two guests was organized and moderated by students from different departments of Ghent University.

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