Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy

Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a host of critical reflections about discourse practises dealing with public health issues. Situating crisis communication at the centre of societal and political debates about responses to the pandemic, this volume analyses the discursive strategies used in a variety of settings. Exploring how crisis discourse has become a part of managing the public health crisis itself, this book focuses on the communicative tasks and challenges for both speakers and their public audiences in seven areas: - establishment of discursive and political authority - official governmental and expert communication to the public - public understanding of government communication - legitimation of public health management as a 'war' - judging and blaming a collective other - cross-national comparison and rivalry - empathy and encouragement Covering global discourses from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand, chapters use corpus-based data to cast light on these issues from a variety of languages. With crisis discourse already the object of fierce national and international debates about the appropriateness of specific communicative styles, information management and 'verbal hygiene', Pandemic and Crisis Discourse offers an authoritative intervention from language experts.

Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia, UK. Ruth Breeze is Professor of English at the Institute of Modern Languages at the Universidad de Navarra, Spain. Kayo Kondo is Teaching Associate at the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. Sara Vilar-Lluch is a Spanish Language Tutor at the Modern Language Centre, King's College London, UK.

We ... recommend to researchers in Discourse Analysis and Rhetoric the reading of this [volume], rich in innovative studies in proposals for future research. * Argumentation et Analyse du Discours (Bloomsbury Translation) * The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the crucial importance of understanding and critiquing health-related communication at a time of global crisis. This volume meets that challenge with a remarkable combination of breadth and depth. It shows that discourse analysis is more relevant than ever to help overcome current and future health crises. * Elena Semino, Professor of Linguistics and Verbal Art, Lancaster University, UK * This exciting and comprehensive volume treats the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on discourse as a truly global phenomenon. Wide ranging in coverage and diverse in content, this authoritative account is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the framing of the pandemic crisis by international institutions and governments around the world. * Jonathan Charteris-Black, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UWE Bristol, UK *