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This article provides a comparative analysis of how frontline workers were constructed by the UK media prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Both the News on the Web Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, as monitor corpora of web-based new articles, were utilised to identify changes in both the frequency and use of the word front*line from 2010 to 2021. Findings show that, following the outbreak of COVID-19, constructions of frontline work were more frequently associated with medical professions and became more figurative in nature. Our findings provide a counterpoint to claims that the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased awareness of the critical nature of many types of ‘low-skilled' work not previously recognised as essential. The study also extends previous research which has traced changes in language and its deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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This study examined talk by parents about the early years transitions of their children (n = 7) in the context of parental non‐standard working hours and Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Parents were interviewed at three time points: when their child was aged one, four, five or six years (a total of 21 interviews). The third interview was conducted during the COVID‐19 pandemic. This article focuses on the children's ECEC transitions and the interpretative frames used by parents when talking about their work and childcare. The frames used by the parents to discuss the children's transitions were stabilising the children's lives, balancing between staying at home and attending ECEC and adjusting to norms and rules. The diversity of families' experiences and their children's transitions during the early years should be considered when developing family policy and ECEC services. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of International Journal of Social Welfare is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
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This article summarizes a research whose general objective was to analyze the way in which the documentary corpus associated with the "Learn at home" strategy reproduces the relations of power, control, social-educational inequality and exclusion in its recipients. The units of analysis were organized in textual visualization matrices with double coding: one open, cross-coded and the other using NVivo v.12 software. Subsequently, the main lines of inquiry were categorized and an inductive categorical interpretation was carried out, relating the categories discourse and society with social knowledge as an interface. The findings indicate that the discursive structures analyzed reproduce power, control, inequality and exclusion, maintaining the status quo, prolonging educational social injustice and privileging symbolic elites;furthermore, the issuers resort to discursive strategies such as the principle of influence, values and praise to achieve the purposes of social domination. As for the research design, this was a qualitative documentary research, of discourse analysis type, in critical perspective from the socio-cognitive approach
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This analysis employs the concept of gratitude to trace key 'moments' in students' global service learning placements. We problematise the uncritical promotion of interculturality as an outcome of such placements. We analyse common narratives of gratitude that emerge from students before, during and after international placements in the Global South. Through focusing on the lifecycle of service learning placement we examine how expressions and recipients of gratitude shift over time, often belying a truly reciprocal exchange assumed to be inherent in service learning. We employ Critical Discourse Analysis to unearth power inequities that emerge from the broader societal relations in which these placements occur. We conclude by looking back to inform how we move forward in a post COVID-19 era in which further punctuation of global inequities will require intensified care to build meaningful and reciprocal service learning activities abroad and at home. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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32 milhões de brasileiros sofriam com a fome na década de 1990. Para dirimir este problema a implantação de políticas públicas de fomento à agricultura familiar no País foi uma das ações mais eficazes. Desde 2015, os recursos destinados a tais políticas reduziram drasticamente, gerando descontinuidade no fornecimento de alimentos a entidades e usuárias(os) dos programas, perdas na renda de agricultoras(es) e insegurança alimentar, situações agravadas com a pandemia de Covid-19. Partindo dos conceitos de segurança alimentar, agricultura familiar e políticas públicas, este artigo objetiva compreender os rebatimentos do desinvestimento das políticas públicas e da pandemia no cotidiano de agricultoras(es) familiares de Barbalha-CE. Prosseguiu-se com o exame de documentos públicos, entrevistas, observações e conversas no cotidiano com agricultoras(es), cujos dados foram compreendidos a partir da análise de práticas discursivas. Os resultados assinalam dificuldades das(os) trabalhadoras(es) em acessar serviços públicos, produzir, comercializar e garantir a segurança alimentar de suas famílias.Alternate :32 million Brazilians suffered from hunger in the 1990s. To solve this problem, the implementation of public policies to promote family farming in the country was one of the most effective actions. Since 2015, the resources allocated to such policies have drastically reduced, generating discontinuity in the supply of food to entities and users of the programs, losses in the income of farmers and food insecurity, situations aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the concepts of food security, family farming and public policies, this article aims to understand the repercussions of the divestment of public policies and the pandemic in the daily lives of family farmers in Barbalha-CE. We continued with the examination of public documents, interviews, observations and daily conversations with female farmers, whose data were understood from the analysis of discursive practices. The results point out the difficulties of the workers in accessing public services, producing, marketing and guaranteeing the food security of their families.
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The impacts of the novel coronavirus (hereafter COVID-19) pose one of the greatest crises of our generation. The policy decisions that the US and Chinese governments take will shape the current order of international relations, the global supply chain of medical supplies, and US–China relations. The COVID-19 crisis leads to the empirical puzzles: how do the two great world powers construct their narratives on the global pandemic and toward each other? What are the meanings, if any, of fear in US–China relations? This study explores the narrative of fear that is constituted in the US and China discourse. The historical analogies, such as the Boxer Indemnity, sick man of Asia, and Pearl Harbor attack, offer great examples to the political construction of the "fearful” other through specific representations amid the outbreak of COVID-19. Specifically, they have become the "cultural scripts” that define how they interact and who they are. The article proceeds as follows. First, this study examines the current literature of realism, constructivism, and discourse analysis. Second, it proposes a comparative framework for understanding the expressions of fear and threat perceptions for both countries. Specifically, the "Pearl Harbor Moment” from the US, and "the Boxer Indemnity” from the Chinese government substantially shape the landscape of US–China relations. Third, it highlights how the political elites appropriate these historical analogies in constructing their political identities and offers insights into the future of US–China relations. Finally, this article concludes with thoughts on the studies on the struggle of great powers and implications for pandemic politics.
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This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university-community engagement (UCE) as an academic mission. The aim of the work is to outline the ways in which UCE has been functioning since the turbulent onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. The study undertakes a systematic review of the UCE literature to identify major trends, raising important questions regarding ongoing scholarly discussions and managerial/policy debates on the subject. The results show seven distinct types of engagement responses by higher education institutions (HEIs) across the globe. In addition, the review identified that HEIs faced difficulties in either adapting existing engagement practices or while establishing new ones, especially regarding the efficient use of digital technologies. In terms of implications, the findings suggest that the pandemic has resulted in new debates about the societal role of HEIs, with medium- and long-term implications for policy and management.
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This study investigates the potential ideological stances reflected in President Trump‟s speeches during the coronavirus crisis through the use of certain lexical items and grammatical constructions, including modal structures, comparative and superlative forms and pronouns. Two speeches delivered by Trump in two different phases of the coronavirus crisis are selected and analyzed in light of Fairclough‟s (1995) CDA three-dimensional model. The study found that Trump used linguistic devices to emphasize concepts related to America‟s superiority and supremacy, national unity, citizens‟ involvement, and self-glorification. In addition, egoism was also stressed through the use of the pronouns "I” and "we”. © 2023 Sciedu Press. All Rights Reserved.
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This study aims to explore the discourse representation of COVID-19 in editorial columns in Jordanian newspapers. The corpus of the study consists of sixty-four editorial columns from three Jordanian newspapers, namely, Addustour, Al-Rai, and Al-Ghad during the period March to November, 2020. A thematic analysis was used in the data analysis to identify the themes represented by the Jordanian newspapers' editorials concerning COVID-19. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was also adopted to understand the discourse representation strategies and discursive practices used by the Jordanian newspapers' editorial columns in their representation of COVID-19. The study has found that the editorials used thirteen themes in representing COVID-19, including pandemic, economic consequences, fighting COVID-19, abiding by health measures, crisis, danger, outbreak, lockdown, raising awareness, fear and worry, lifestyle changing, threat to humanity, and killing. Furthermore, the editorials used ten representational discourse strategies to represent COVID-19, namely, positive self-presentation, implication, actor description, authority, example/illustration, evidentiality, lexicalization, metaphor, negative other-presentation, and number game.
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During pandemics, health discourse cannot be separated from media discourse, which usually exercises its power to deliver particular ideological and political perspectives through the content it presents. This study aimed to investigate the coverage of the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan in local and nonlocal Arabic news outlets. It shed light on the potential ideologies reflected in the news headlines and articles. To achieve the objectives of the study, eight local and fourteen nonlocal news articles tackling the first case of COVID-19 in Jordan on the 2nd and 3rd of March 2020 were collected and analyzed in light of Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis (CDA) approach. The results showed that the nonlocal news headlines and articles included words with negative connotations that may create resentment and spread panic among citizens. On the other hand, in local news outlets, reassuring phrases were used by focusing on the government's procedures and distancing Jordan from the country where the virus widely spread, namely, Italy.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, which is one of the biggest epidemics of the last century and can be regarded as a global tragedy, leaders had to mobilize many resources of their countries quickly and persuade their citizens to change their routine behavior. The approach followed by the leaders of the country in their efforts to convince their people has been an important factor in their success or failure. This paper aims to examine with Michel Foucault's notion of biopower, and discourses and behaviors of women leaders in countries against the global pandemic which cost high life tool gave harsh messages to the humanity. For this purpose, leadership examples in Finland, Iceland, Taiwan and New Zealand will be examined in detail using the discourse analysis technique. As a result, in current times when populist and autocratic leader style is on the rise, women leaders not only took their countries to success, but they also managed to inspire other countries. More importantly, the struggle of women leaders against the pandemic revealed that a different management style is possible.
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In this paper, I would like to demonstrate through a concrete case study, the processes and techno-discursive strategies deployed by two medical influencers to create a discourse of authority in Twitter. First, I will present the theoretical framework through which I understand the notion of authority at the intersection of the conceptions developed by Oger (2021) in discourse analysis, by Origgi in social epistemology (2008), and by Broudoux in information and communication sciences (2007), as well as the case studies conducted by myself (Vicari, 2021, 2021b, 2022) in discourse analysis. This will allow me to identify the elements that form the basis of what can be considered a relationship of authority, which I propose to show in a second phase, on a corpus of tweets borrowed from the accounts of a health nano-influencer (DrMus) and a health micro-influencer (Marine Lorphelin), both of whom are young doctors who have been particularly active on Twitter since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. My aim is to show that far from erasing any type of authority, digital devices, and in particular Twitter, favor the development of trusting relationships based on manifestations of authority that are situated halfway between the technological parameters of the devices and discursive marks.
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Care homes often have to face negative stereotypes depicting them as dreaded places where older and/or disabled patients are brought to spend the last period of their life. These institutions may thus use their websites to communicate a more positive self-description;this often entails depicting the care homes as real homes for their residents. The present paper aims to understand more precisely the characteristics of this 'home-likeness', by carrying out a corpus-assisted discourse analysis focusing on Italian websites of care homes situated in Lombardy, compared with a corpus of English websites of care homes based in London. Moreover, it discusses the implications of this 'home-likeness' during the coronavirus pandemic, where the concept of sheltering at home was variably used by governments and health institutions alike (both in Italy and in the UK) to gather consensus around lockdown restrictions. It concludes that the metaphor of home used in long-term residential seniors care is diffuse, but is often culture-bound, as the comparison between Italian and English websites shows both some similarities and some differences. However, in both cases it appears sometimes paradoxical and insufficient to ensure adequate patient-centred care, especially during pandemics. © Peter Lang Group AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2023. All rights reserved.
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People with disabilities (PwD) are a COVID-19 vulnerable group, and globally they are experiencing even higher rates of social exclusion than before the pandemic. Value co-creation is a process whereby firms and their customers work together to develop service offerings and provides a tool for service improvement during disruptions such as health crises. Although many cultural and tourist attractions have access and inclusion as part of their strategic plans not all of them have turned to value co-creation to address access and inclusion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They also have varying degrees of understandings about what facilitates social inclusion. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, this study explores how museums have addressed access and inclusion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the degree of uptake, discourses of value co-creation, and how their responses can be categorised. The research design included semi-structured, participatory interviews with 15 managers from eight museums;and ethnographic observation and semi-structured, post-museum visit interviews with 12 PwD. Then, an iterative data analysis process using ATLAS-ti was undertaken. The results provide insight into the social inclusion of PwD in museums during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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To alleviate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on tourism, tourist facilities in Bali are informing visitors of the relevant health protocols, using posters to describe the appropriate behaviours. Using critical discourse analysis, this study examines the microstructure of the texts in these posters to identify their semantic, syntactic, lexical, and rhetorical elements. The study findings show that the semantic aspects consist of background, intention, and detail. The syntactic elements involve coherence and the use of the pronouns 'you' and 'we', and of the imperative, and the declarative. The lexical aspects include abbreviations and vocabulary, related to the health protocol. The textual messages are delivered in official language, supported by pictures and photographs.
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For this chapter, I raise social psychologist Margaret Wetherell's metaphorical sledgehammer, breaking down the affective-discursive practices which come freighted with emotions, politics, as well as the promise of dignity and a renascent sense of community as we transition into, through and eventually out of, coronacrisis. I examine how we make meaning during COVID, across thresholds of physical distance, observing the ad hoc signage which mark interventions into public space through queueing stickers, yard signs, and window decals which help us navigate through the everyday spaces of the pandemic. Here, I conduct multimodal discourse analysis of the semiotic landscapes of Lincoln, Nebraska and Sioux Falls, South Dakota during the height of the first wave of the pandemic (Spring into Summer 2020) in the Great Plains region of the United States. I argue that these semiotic landscapes form a diverse, polysemic affective regime spatialized across a patchwork of bodies. By analyzing the affective regimes and practices instantiated by ad hoc signage in public spaces, I aim to understand the discursive and embodied (and discursively embodied) forces which quicken common things and common landscapes with theoretical importance in these exceptional times. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a sharp increase in health disparities among racial and ethnic US minority communities. This study aims to understand the social determinants of health issues of racial/ethnic US minority populations before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, this study establishes the extent to which Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Gibbs Sampling Dirichlet Multinomial Mixture (GSDMM)-based topic modeling determines social determinants of health (SDOH) categories, and how adequately custom named-entity recognition (NER) detects key SDOH factors from a Reddit corpus. Moreover, we performed an inductive thematic discourse analysis on the Reddit corpus and High Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN)-based clustering on the thematic discourse results. We collected race/ethnicity-related data from five subreddits representing five highly populated cities in the US from March to December 2019 (prior to the pandemic) and from March to December 2020 (during the pandemic). Our study identified 35 SDOH-related topics, 22 themes, and revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic significantly exacerbated SDOH issues of racial/ethnic US minority communities. On average, conversations about the Social and Community Context (SCC) category of SDOH had the highest percent increase (358%) from the pre-pandemic period to the pandemic period across all locations and population groups. Some of the SCC issues were racism, protests, arrests, immigration, police brutality, hate crime, white supremacy, and discrimination. The dissertation offers automatic ways to glean SDOH-related information from social media. Furthermore, the knowledge gained from this study will empower researchers, governments, and policymakers to design interventions to shift racial and ethnic disparities toward more equitable outcomes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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The COVID-19 pandemic engenders unemployment risks globally and locally. Reflectively engaging in Beck's risk society debates, this paper critically reviews the discursive effects of „risks" when employed by the government in debates about unemployment insurance since the 1997 sovereignty handover. We break down the concept of risk into four layers: moral risk, financial risk, socio-economic risk and political risk and bring to light the contradictory outcomes that colour the nuanced attitudes among the state, the NGOs and the affected subjects.
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Many societies experienced pushback against governmental COVID-19 measures. When the Norwegian government made it a punishable offence to spend the night at privately owned cabins in the first phase of the pandemic, this resulted in discussions and pushback. Basing our research on in-depth interviews at three different time points during the pandemic, we ask how Norwegian participants discursively explain why the cabin ban was the first measure that evoked pushback in Norway. We conducted a Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), exploring three overarching explanations provided by the interview participants. In the first explanation, the pushback was presented as a result of the cultural importance of the cabin. Here, participants partly legitimised the pushback when constructing it as a predictable reaction in this cultural context. In the second explanation, participants constructed the pushback as an expression of 'cabin people' in particular and Norwegians in general being 'too privileged' to acknowledge the measure's necessity. Here, the pushback was constructed as an illegitimate reaction. In the third explanation, participants explained the pushback as a result of people seeing the measure as meaningless. This interpretation constructs pushback as a legitimate response to an illogical measure. These different constructions illustrate the complexity of compliance with COVID measures, where people negotiated individual freedom against solidarity, and compliance against critical thinking. The article contributes to the understanding of people's negotiations of resistance and pushback against restrictive measures. We argue that social psychological theory and research need to acknowledge the temporal, contextual and ideological specificities in understanding compliance and non-compliance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)