The Science and Crisis Communication (SCC) research group at the Department of Science, Technology and Society (STS) explores how societies navigate crises and scientific challenges in an era of rapid technological change. With a focus on texts, visual and multimodal content, the research examines how media discourses influence crisis narratives, and public perceptions.

A key area of our current work is the role of visual communication in crisis contexts, particularly in climate change discourse. The ClimateVisions project, funded by the BMBF, applies advanced machine learning and automated image analysis to understand how visual representations of climate change evoke emotions and impact public attitudes. We explore social media users’s engagement with different content types, including manipulated content and examine their role in the politicization and polarization of scientific issues. 

Beyond climate communication, we investigate how global crises - such as the COVID-19 pandemic - shape media narratives and influence public discourse. The Emmy Noether research group ‘Media Portrayal of Majority and Minority Groups’ examines how media coverage of marginalized groups differs across time, topics, and countries.

Methodologically, our work combines computational social science methods for the study of images and texts with qualitative methods that allows us a more comprehensive understanding of how scientific knowledge and crises are communicated across different media environments.