Youth without COVID-19 immunization: between individualism and mistrust

The aim of the present work is to analyze the different discourses of the COVID-19 unvaccinated young people in the Community of Madrid, in order to understand the motivations and internal coherences that they express to legitimize non-vaccination. For this purpose, we will carry out a methodological triangulation composed of in-depth interviews, ethnography of urban spaces and social network analysis focused on Telegram groups. Thus, we have analyzed the qualitative materials through Grounded Theory procedures and critical discourse analysis. Finally, the three key discursive dimensions found are presented as a result: the right to individual autonomy, social and political manipulation and distrust towards vaccines on scientific grounds. © 2023 Federacion Espanola de Sociologia. All rights reserved.

"To honour cleanness and shame filth”: medical facemasks as the narrative of nationalism and modernity in China

As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the world, the wearing of medical facemasks has become a hot topic on social media. In China, the relevant discourses are entangled with codes of medical science, national self-esteem and appropriated modernity. These discourses can be dated back to the narrative established by Dr Wu Lien-teh, the great fighter in the Manchurian plagues of 1910–1911 and 1920–1921. This paper reveals that Wu and his colleagues used different strategies when displaying to the Western world their achievements in the anti-plague battle and when proving the effectiveness of the Western medical and hygienic system to Chinese people. Wu and his colleagues used metonymies, analogues and metaphors on or related to medical facemasks to illustrate the possibility of building a modernised nation with sovereignty. Because the construction of a sanitary system in China has always been labelled as a patriotic movement (Rogaski, Ruth. 2004. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 285–298), the wearing of medical facemasks has constituted an important part of the narrative of nationalism and hygienic modernity. This discourse continues to play a significant role in today's campaign against the coronavirus.

Expert?s Discourses about Climate Change in Spain: Communicate Uncertainties or not, that is the Question

Social attitudes to climate change are strongly influenced by the uncertainties associated with it;in turn, perceptions of them depend on the experts: the actors socially entitled to produce valid knowledge about the climate. Theirs points of view have been scarcely studied in Spain. Filling this empirical gap is the aim of this article based on the analysis of the discourse produced in in-depth interviews to experts in the subject. The analysis carried out within the framework of the << sociology of ignorance >> reveals a sharp awareness of scientific uncertainties linked to the fear of its use for justify-ing climate change denial and inaction. The vision of global futures in a context of global warming is bleak;by contrast, personal horizons appear less disturbing. The epistemic gap between experts and laymen is reaffirmed, but some argue that both positions are interchangeable. The interviewees agree that experts have to advice institutions and inform society, and that uncertainties are difficult to com-municate;and disagree over the pros and cons of communicating them to laymen. In conclusion: cli-mate change -together with the doubts raised by COVID-19- leads the Spanish experts to confront scientific uncertaintes and to ponder the challenge of its public communication.

Governing Rural Poverty on Urban Streets: Guangzhou's Management of Beggars in the Reform Era

This study investigates how discourses on panhandling intertwine with the governance of beggars on China's urban streets. It focuses on local policy implementation in Guangzhou city, led by the bureau of civil affairs along with its centres for "custody and repatriation” and "assistance stations.” The study aims to understand how the state regulates panhandling and engages with beggars in public spaces. Exploring the internal logic of the state's approach and how it has changed during the 40 years of reform, it also considers the junctures at which contradictions and conflicts arise. Based on fieldwork data (2011 to 2014) and the analysis of government documents, yearbooks, academic and mass media discourses, I argue that the state's treatment of panhandlers poses a conundrum as welfare measures conflict with control. While several layers of state regulation and actors contradict each other and create grey areas of state-induced informality, people who beg for alms are continuously criminalized and excluded from public space.

Navigating COVID-19 linguistic landscapes in Vancouver's North Shore: official signs, grassroots literacy artefacts, monolingualism, and discursive convergence

This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area's parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province's lockdown. Following the principles of visual, walking ethnography, I walked through numerous locations, observing and recording the visual representations of the province's policies and discourses of lockdown and social distancing. Examples of change were most evident in the rapid addition to social space of top-down signs, characterised mainly by multimodality and monolingualism, strategically placed in ways that encouraged local people to abide by social-distancing. However, through this process of observation and exploration, I noticed grassroots semiotic artefacts such as illustrated stones with images and messages that complemented the official signs of the provincial government. As was the case with the official signs and messages, through a process of discursive convergence, these grassroots artefacts performed a role of conveying messages and discourses of social distancing, public pedagogy, and community care.

The UK COVID-19 contact tracing app as both an emerging technology and public health intervention: The need to consider promissory discourses.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) COVID-19 contact tracing app was announced to the British public on 12th April 2020. The UK government endorsed the app as a public health intervention that would improve public health, protect the NHS and 'save lives'. On 5th May 2020 the technology was released for trial on the Isle of Wight. However, the trial was halted in June 2020, reportedly due to technological issues. The app was later remodelled and launched to the public in September 2020. The rapid development, trial and discontinuation of the app over a short period of a few months meant that the mobilisation and effect of the discourses associated with the app could be traced relatively easily. In this paper we aimed to explore how these discourses were constructed in the media, and their effect on actors - in particular, those who developed and those who trialled the app. Promissory discourses were prevalent, the trajectory of which aligned with theories developed in the sociology of expectations. We describe this trajectory, and then interpret its implications in terms of infectious disease public health practices and responsibilities.

Emergency and Deservingness: Young People in the Italian Pandemic Debate

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, young people had a peculiar position in Italian public and institutional discourses. On the one hand, their complex living conditions nourished preoccupations and calls for intervention to save an "endangered"social group. On the other hand, young people's behaviours were constantly placed under scrutiny as potentially dangerous for themselves and society. Through an analysis of public and institutional discourses on youth and youth policies elaborated during the pandemic, the article analyses the interplay of these competing narratives in political and policy choices during the Covid-19 emergency exploring how young people's (un)deservingness has been framed. In doing so, the article asks what understanding of youth sustains recent institutional choices in terms of resources distribution and what institutions have learnt on (and from) young people during the pandemic. © FrancoAngeli.

Irreparable Damage: International Housing Rights and Local Housing Struggles in Rome after 2020

The recent interventions of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) to suspend evictions of tenants in Rome, Italy, allows us to shed light into the forthcoming social catastrophe caused by Italian housing policies, and into the new advancements of social movements for housing. As two scholar-activists involved both in research on housing and in political actions to prevent evictions, we describe how housing movements in Rome are facing the contradictions between local and international discourses on the right to housing.

Understanding Digital Identity during the Pandemic: An Investigation of Two Chinese Spanish Teachers

During combatting the COVID-19 pandemic, the most widespread change in Spanish as a foreign language instruction is imperative online teaching. It demands that language teachers move all teaching activities to virtual platforms, facilitating the construction of their digital identities. However, there is scarce attention on Spanish teachers' professional development, given the necessity of understanding the evolvement of their identities across virtual learning platforms. Through the lens of a case study, this research explores the digital identities of Spanish as a foreign language teachers during the school lockdown in 2022. The data includes semi-structured interviews, virtual classroom discourse, lesson plans, and reflective writing. The results show that Spanish teachers formed multiple digital identities, including curriculum innovators, vulnerable actors, involuntary team workers, overseas returnees, and academic researchers. Among them, the first three are core identities, while overseas returnees and academic researchers are peripheral identities. Regardless, they were formed and negotiated under the influence of teachers' past experiences, the exercise of agency, emotional vulnerability, and social context. In addition, a contradictory belief in teaching was also identified during the formation of Chinese Spanish teachers' digital identities.

Safety in schools during COVID-19, and its implications for democratic education

During the COVID-19 pandemic, calls to protect children and young people have proliferated in educational contexts, consolidating safety as a core principle guiding an increasing number of decisions at schools. Recently, however, more and more scholars have begun to question the ambiguous nature of "safety", analysing the tensions between this concept, education, and children's citizenship. The purpose of this article is to problematise the political and educational implications created by concerns about safety in the unprecedented times of COVID-19. Using Apple and Beane's (2007) classic work on democratic education, our study delves into the educational experiences of nine educators and eight students in Aotearoa New Zealand during COVID-19 to explore their uses of safety. Our findings highlight the nuanced ways in which the discourses of safety can lead to curricular and pedagogical practices of comfort, isolation, and control.

"You're not my nanny!” Responses to racialized women leaders during COVID-19

In the early days of the pandemic, public health officials and politicians across the globe relied on Twitter to rapidly communicate COVID-19 information. Although the majority of these authority figures continue to be privileged white men, the number of women and racialized leaders is increasing. We analyze how users responded to public health tweets by Canada's top public health official Dr. Theresa Tam and New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham. Examining responses to these two racialized women through a critical discourse analysis, we uncover a pattern of users mobilizing gendered and racialized discourses to undermine the message, sow public distrust, and challenge the authority of Tam and Lujan Grisham. This paper documents hostility in the digital public square that, we argue, constitutes intersectional harassing backlash which could have implications for the efficacy of public health messaging on and offline.

STUDENTS' DISCOURSES DURING THE ONLINE DISTANCE LEARNING IN THE FIRST WAVE OF THE COVID19 PANDEMIC: AN ACTION RESEARCH WITH STUDENTS AS CO-RESEARCHERS

The COVID-19 pandemic affected education communities by turning students and teachers abruptly to online teaching. This imposition of digital education is being investigated by various researchers all over the world since it has changed the way we conceive of the use of technology in classrooms and in our lives in general. Nevertheless, the students' voice is being neglected and not taken seriously into account. In this paper an action research is presented with the teacher acting as researcher and the students as co-researchers. This action research took place during the first wave of the pandemic (March 2020-May 2020) in Crete, Greece. The students, after investigating the online education in general and after various discussions, in their final accounts reflected upon a. the changes in their role as students, b. the changes in the role of the teacher, c. they proposed the role that a teacher should have today. The teacher-researcher analyzed these three categories with Critical Discourse Analysis to identify the discourses the students promoted or silenced. The findings showed that online education is not a success story as promoted by researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders;rather it lacks human elements like humor, psychological support, and instant interaction © 2023, Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education.All Rights Reserved.

DISCURSOS EXPERTOS SOBRE EL CAMBIO CLIMÁTICO EN ESPAÑA: COMUNICAR LAS INCERTIDUMBRES O NO, ESA ES LA CUESTIÓN

En las disposiciones sociales ante el cambio climático influyen notablemente las incertidumbres que lo envuelven. Su conocimiento, a su vez, depende de los expertos: los actores legitimados para producir un saber válido sobre el clima. Como en España sus puntos de vista apenas han sido estudiados, este artículo los aborda mediante un análisis del discurso generado en entrevistas en profundidad a especialistas en la materia. Los discursos examinados a través de la óptica de la «sociología de la ignorancia» revelan una aguda conciencia de las incertezas científicas, unida al temor a que sean utilizadas para justificar el negacionismo y la inacción. La visión del futuro común amenazado por el calentamiento global es sombría, en contraste con el horizonte individual, menos pesimista. Se reafirma la división epistemológica entre expertos y legos, aunque para algunos son posiciones intercambiables. Hay acuerdo en que los especialistas deben asesorar e informar a las instituciones y la sociedad, aunque les cuesta comunicar las incertidumbres;y discrepan en cuanto a la conveniencia de exponerlas a los legos. El análisis concluye que el cambio climático -sumado a las dudas suscitadas por el COVID-19- aboca a los expertos españoles a afrontar las incertidumbres científicas y a sopesar los pros y contras de su comunicación pública.Alternate :Social attitudes to climate change are strongly influenced by the uncertainties associated with it;in turn, perceptions of them depend on the experts: the actors socially entitled to produce valid knowledge about the climate. Theirs points of view have been scarcely studied in Spain. Filling this empirical gap is the aim of this article based on the analysis of the discourse produced in in-depth interviews to experts in the subject. The analysis carried out within the framework of the «sociology of ignorance» reveals a sharp awareness of scientific uncertainties linked to the fear of its use for justifying climate change denial and inaction. The vision of global futures in a context of global warming is bleak;by contrast, personal horizons appear less disturbing. The epistemic gap between experts and laymen is reaffirmed, but some argue that both positions are interchangeable. The interviewees agree that experts have to advice institutions and inform society, and that uncertainties are difficult to communicate;and disagree over the pros and cons of communicating them to laymen. In conclusion: climate change -together with the doubts raised by COVID-19- leads the Spanish experts to confront scientific uncertaintes and to ponder the challenge of its public communication.

Pasifika girls resisting the schooling regime of safety

In the last few decades, the word ‘safety' has become silently but increasingly pervasive in educational policies and debates, gaining a new momentum with the pandemic. Our intention in this article is to problematise what is done in schools in the name of safety by delving into the safety policy discourses of a New Zealand school and the narratives of resistance employed by a group of female Pasifika students during the Covid-19 crisis. This critical ethnographic inquiry explores how safety at schools operates as a mechanism to oppress their fights and reproduce inequalities in an era of apparent ‘racism without racists'. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Rewriting the hills: Youth sociality as a mode of navigating unemployment in a context of outmigration in North India

This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration', but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

How a Deadly Pandemic Cleared the Air: Narratives and Practices Linking COVID-19 with Air Pollution and Climate Change

The recent COVID-19 pandemic revealed the intricate connections between human and planetary health. Air pollution cleared over the countries ordering lockdowns of nonessential businesses to flatten the curve of the pandemic. The links between pandemics and pollution are not obvious at first, yet the two phenomena have several characteristics in common. Both pandemics and pollution originate from specific locations but then spread globally, and both are human-induced rather than natural–hazard disasters. I examine narratives and practices linking COVID-19 with air pollution and climate change as the pandemic unfolds. I compare these findings with research on the Black Death plague in Europe and the air pollution in China's Haze City. Applying the analytical frameworks from these two studies, I analyze media articles and reports on COVID-19 to explore risk experience, stress behaviours, and resistant discourse during the adaptive cycles of the pandemic to gain insights into current and future changes to sustainability.

"Everything will be all right (?)”: Discourses on COVID-19 in the Italian linguistic landscape

The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) focuses on the representations of languages on signs placed in the public space and on the ways in which individuals interact with these elements. Regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, and transgressive discourses, among others, emerge in these spaces, overlapping, complementing, or opposing each other, reflecting changes taking place and, in turn, influencing them. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of life, including cities, neighborhoods, and spaces in general. Against this background, the study of the LL is fundamental not only to better understand the ways in which places have changed and how people are interpreting and experiencing them but also to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 discourses since the pandemic broke out. This contribution aims to investigate how and in what terms the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the Italian LL, considered both in its entirety, as a single body that, regardless of local specificities, responded to and jointly reflected on the shared shock, and specifically, assuming the city of Florence as a case study. The data collected in the three main phases of the pandemic include photographs of virtual and urban LL signs and interviews, which were analyzed through qualitative content analysis with the aim of exploring citizens' perceptions and awareness of changes in the LL of their city. The results obtained offer a photograph of complex landscapes and ecologies, which are multimodal, multi-layered, and interactive, with public and private discourses that are strongly intertwined and often complementary. Furthermore, the diachronic analysis made it possible to identify, on the one hand, points in common with the communication strategies in the different phases, both at a commercial and regulatory level. On the other hand, strong differences emerged in the bottom-up representations, characterized in the first phase by discourses of resilience, tolerance, hope, solidarity, and patriotism, and in the second and third phases by disillusionment, despair, and protest. Copyright © 2023 Bagna and Bellinzona.

Buycotting to save the neighbourhood? exploring the altered meaning of social infrastructures of consumption during the Covid-19 crisis in Linden, Hannover, Germany

The Sars-CoV-2 virus and the related public health measures have triggered a break in everyday life. Despite growing global protest movements against these health measures, ‘solidarity' was called for by civil society groups, affected businesses, and politicians as an intuitive mode of action in this crisis. Writing from Germany, we explore how in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis a specific discourse of solidarity and locality blossomed;namely a call to solidarity-based consumption. Using documentary photography, we discuss the shifts in the attribution of meaning and discourses through which consumption has been framed by small-shop owners in Linden, Hannover, Germany. In the paper, we explore the local geographies of boycotting and specifically the ways calls for boycotting are articulated by shop owners in the neighbourhood. We find that these calls became entangled with a specific neighbourhood identity. Through our photographic documentation we also find that purchases at local stores are now framed as a necessary act of local support. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of consumption as a strategy to overcome crisis and express solidarity.

Racialized (Im)mobilities: The Pandemic and Sinophobia in Australia

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted countries all over the world, not only in relation to public health responses, but on multiple other societal levels. The pandemic has uncovered structural inequalities within and across societies and highlighted how race remains a powerful lens through which public policy responses are constructed and pursued. This paper examines (im)mobilities in Australia in the context of Asian, and more specifically Chinese-Australian citizens and residents, and how these have been framed in racialized discourses that justified exclusionary practices reminiscent of the White Australia ideology. The paper focuses on how Chinese Australians' mobilities have been (mis)represented and attacked in public and political discourse with particular attention to the situation of Chinese international students' (im)mobilities. Our conceptual attention in this paper, however, is not only on the racialization of mobilities but also immobilities, underpinned by an understanding of the relationality between Othered ‘migrants' and hosts, as well as between mobility and immobility. We conclude by discussing future patterns of mobility, how these will impact prospective migrants including international students, and what future forms of mobilities might mean for Australia as a country highly dependent on migrants for its economic, social and cultural development.

Critical Discourse Analysis of Covid-19 Vaccine News in the English and Arabic Media

The virus takes a toll on people worldwide regarding the economy and social life, control the spread of this virus and taking the vaccine are most problems faced by the governments. This article examines the news coverage of the Coronavirus vaccine, focusing on the Covid-19 vaccine and how it has been exploited politically and ideologically in the English and Arabic media (BBC and Al-Jazeera). Since there are limited researches of CDA on the vaccine discourse in the media (how the vaccine is portrayed), this study aims to contribute to the researches in CDA about Covid-19 vaccine discourse. Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional critical discourse analysis was utilised as a foundational framework to investigate the amount to which power is linguistically expressed persuasively in every discourse of different media genres using particular lexical, rhetorical, and pragmatic methods. A qualitative approach was used to analyse the selected data (two discourses from each media type). The findings revealed that the governments, through media, had used linguistic features to persuade people's minds, convincing them to take the vaccine as the only solution. The ethical appeal, cultural, societal and religious is very well generated in the discourse of both media genres.