The semiotics of the anti-COVID-19 mask

The pandemic spreading of the COVID-19 virus has led to the global need to introduce, often by law, the medical face mask, which can undoubtedly be considered as "the object of 2020.” In a few months, most human faces around the world in the public space, but also often in the private space, have been covered with various kinds of protective masks. Very soon, these objects have become the centre of several discursive productions, going from medical reports to media coverage, from artistic representations to ironic memes. The medical face mask was not totally new in the west, where it was already present in special circumstances, like dentists' studios or emergency rooms, and was quite familiar in the east, especially in Japan, China, and Korea. Yet such massive introduction changed the meaning of the medical face mask in every context. Old habits were reconfigured or clashed with the new ones, giving rise to a novel syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the human face in conjunction with this device and in the context of the global pandemic. The present paper offers an introduction to a semiotic mapping of such radical cultural change and its likely consequences.

Edmund Burke and the Pandemic Iconology in Media Images and Contemporary Art

This paper investigates the role of media, artistic and verbal images of the COVID-19 pandemic in creating feelings of fear and terror that have a paralysing effect on individuals, by connecting them with Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime. Acknowledging William J. T. Mitchell's interpretation of Burke's distinction between the artistic and the political sublime, the paper analyses the revolutionary potential of images, or rather its absence. Media images contain a clear iconographic pattern that incorporates Burke's fundamental characteristics of the sublime: they are dark and obscure, and embody the most powerful of all fears - the fear of death. Photographs in the mass media conceptualize the effect of the virus on the individual, the society and space. The motifs relate to the visualization of the COVID-19 molecule, which has become a symbol of the global pandemic, to photos of individuals affected by the disease (from patients to medical staff, as well as healthy individuals standing in lines for the vaccine), images that show the effect of the virus on the system and indicate the powerlessness of institutions in the fight against the disease (under-capacity of hospital staff and equipment), and to photographs of spaces that have been changed by the effects of the pandemic (empty city squares and streets, terraces of hospitality establishments). The iconography of media images, in all four described categories, includes the production of fear, while media messages such as "stay at home" imply passivity as the most desirable form of socially responsible activity, which leads to the fragmentation of society into a series of isolated individuals whose communication with the world takes place through a screen. Verbal and visual images function synergistically, amplifying the paralysing effect. The analysis of artistic images was conducted on the example of an online project of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, FB for your thoughts / FB misao na dan. The motifs in the images are compared to Burke's notions of privation, infinity, uniformity, and silence as important aspects of the sublime. Artistic images primarily communicate a closing off (theme of bunkers, confinement in one's own apartment, view through the window of a TV screen) and acceptance of a situation in which the fragmentation of society into isolated individuals leads to sensory deprivation - loss of contact with others. The emptiness of space, similar to the isolation of man, contains meaning in what it does not show (the virus), which is a prerequisite for creating such images. Besides these media and artistic images, the paper also includes an analysis of the metaphorical language of verbal images, which in turn create mental images of the virus as a subject that attacks, spreads, threatens... The visualization of statistical data is an ubiquitous media image that supports the metaphorical image of the coronavirus disease as a subject with a life of its own - it grows, dominates, kills, destroys, sleeps ... The synergistic effects of the verbal, media and artistic images affect the individuals and the society, activating the strongest possible sensations within the scope of human experience, which Burke calls the sublime. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the paper considers the global and all-pervading effect of sublime images, which have produced a paralysing effect that is truly unprecedented in modern history. The aim of this research was to emphasise the relevance of Burke's theory in the contemporary communication situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 Institute of Art History. All rights reserved.

Comparing the Rhetorical characteristics of the Covid-19 related content in TV, News Agencies and Instagram

Focusing on the message creation techniques, this article analyzes the rhetorical devices used for message production in four news agencies, news at 21 pm on channel one of IRIB and Instagram texts during the first months of the spread of the Corona virus. Based on the literature review, research on the management of the production of content related to Covid-19 distributed by the media is important because audiences consume the content in both traditional and modern media and are affected by them. However, previous studies have not analyzed the types of information from the perspective of the rhetorical tools in crisis management. The conceptual framework of the present paper is based on the importance of perception in crisis management and the three categories of Instructing, Adjusting and Internalizing information according to Sturges' theory. The effectiveness of crisis communication depends on the rhetorical and sequence of information presentation during the crisis. So, Instructing information should be provided firstly, then Adjusting information and finally, Internalizing information. Techniques of content production are identified by using qualitative content analysis, identifying the rhetorical devices used in the texts, and the two concepts of schemes and tropes in Leigh's model. Accordingly, a number of 257 news items broadcasted on Iranian National TV, 17519 news items appeared in news agencies and 17 Instagram pages with more than 1000 followers have been analyzed. The findings show that content production techniques can be separated from three perspectives: a) Presentation format: Interview, film, conversation, animation, comic, vector, PowerPoint, and diagram are common formats. b) Content production methods: comparison, explanation, naming, metaphor, emphasis, simplification, and sensitization. c) Content production purpose: the common objectives are judgment, education, informing, hopefulness, panic. In concluding: The presentation format on Instagram has been more diverse than that of television and news agencies. Among the types of content, videos and especially videos that have humorous content and Islamic medicine, have been viewed more than others. Confrontation with anti-science can be seen in news agencies and Instagram, but 21 pm TV broadcasts do not pay attention to this issue. TV and news agencies have used tropes, but no scheme has been used on Instagram. The effectiveness of the content influencing on the behavior change decreases in Instagram, news agency and television, respectively.

Predicting COVID-19 Case Counts using Twitter Image Data

A crucial task with diseases, such as COVID-19, is accurate forecasting of cases for early detection of spikes, which allows policymakers to adjust local restrictions. The use of face masks to prevent disease spread among the general population has become widespread due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While predictive models for COVID-19 case counts exist, capturing localized information about mask usage has the potential to improve prediction accuracy. In this paper, we develop time series models that utilize Twitter image data for COVID-19 case count prediction. A crucial part of such a model is the accurate detection of face mask presence in Twitter images, which we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform. While multiple datasets exist to train CNNs for face mask detection, existing datasets do not adequately represent the complexity nor the diversity in social media images. To address this and create a sufficiently accurate CNN for use with social media images, we also present a new social media face mask image dataset designed for the training of CNNs to detect the presence of face masks in complex real-world images, such as social media images. The presented dataset consists of approximately 120k images and attempts to more adequately account for diversity in ethnicity, mask type, and physical orientation of individuals in images than existing datasets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the CNN model for face mask detection and the resulting time series model trained on data obtained from applying the CNN model to historical twitter data, illustrating that data on the presence of masks in social media images can increase predictive accuracy of time series models for COVID-19 case counts. © 2022 IEEE.

The language of suppression: Muslims, migrant workers, and India's response to COVID-19

When a society faces a moment of crisis, its language can mirror, expose, and reinforce societal chaos and fault lines. As India came to terms with COVID-19, the coronavirus' impacts on different populations exposed and widened India's deep social, economic, and religious divides. This article studies the language of India's response to COVID-19 surrounding three major events that occurred in the early months of the pandemic: the janta curfew, the Tablighi Jamaat incident, and the migrant worker crisis. Through an analysis of media reports, speeches made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and representations on social media, we see how forms of linguistic trickery—silence, presuppositions, accommodations, othering, dog whistling, and povertyism—were used to suppress, harm, and marginalize two minority groups: Muslims and migrant workers. This article demonstrates how those in power use language to reflect, shape, and reinforce meaning, social hierarchies, and marginalization in a time of crisis. (Linguistic trickery, othering, silence, presupposition, accommodation, dog whistling, povertyism)

Cristalización legislativa de los procesos de securitización de la covid-19. Aplicabilidad del modelo de la Escuela de Seguridad de Copenhague al análisis de la Ley 4/1981 sobre los estados de alarma, excepción y sitio y la Ley 2/2021 de medidas para la gestión de la pandemia

El objeto de este artículo es realizar una propuesta teórico-metodológica a partir del modelo de análisis de la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague para incorporar el examen de textos legislativos al estudio de los procesos de securitización. Con este objetivo, se realiza una aproximación al estudio de la securitización de la pandemia de la covid-19 a través del análisis comparativo de dos textos que han dado cobertura legislativa a la gestión de esta crisis sanitaria en España. El texto de la Ley orgánica 4/1981 sobre los estados de alarma, excepción y sitio;y el texto de la Ley 2/2021 del Parlamento Vasco de medidas para la gestión de la pandemia. Metodológicamente, este artículo analiza la securitización de la covid-19 a partir del modelo propuesto por la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague desarrollado a raíz de la publicación de Security: A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al., 1997). Numerosas investigaciones han aplicado este modelo de análisis en el estudio de las políticas de seguridad sobre fenómenos como los movimientos migratorios (Müller y Gerbauer, 2021), la emergencia climática o la crisis sanitaria de la covid-19, examinando objetos tan diversos como los textos publicados en medios de comunicación social (Karyotis et al., 2021), el análisis de las audiencias (Bengtsson y Rhinard, 2019) o los discursos políticos (Kuleteva y Clifford, 2021). Un modelo que también se nutrió de las contribuciones posteriores de Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) y Stritzel (2007, 2012) que ampliaron aún más los objetos de estudio de la securitización, que dejaron de ser exclusivamente textos de carácter político comunicados de manera lineal, para incorporar el análisis de la audiencia como un agente que interactúa y participa de la creación del discurso securitizador, la performance asociada a la ejecución del discurso o la interactividad del discurso en las redes sociodigitales. Sin embargo, pese a esta diversificación de estudios, la mayoría de las investigaciones sobre la securitización siguen centrándose en textos pertenecientes a discursos políticos o mediáticos. Se observa una ausencia de análisis de otro tipo de textos como aquellos de carácter legislativo, que también es interesante estudiar en el marco de estos procesos. Se trata de textos que, en muchos casos, dan cobertura legislativa a la aplicación de políticas de seguridad y podrían representar la cristalización legal de discursos político mediáticos previos. Dicho esto, dado el carácter jurídico de los textos que se examinan en este artículo, conviene señalar que el análisis que se propone es de carácter discursivo. Sin analizar las implicaciones jurídicas de los textos, cuestión que necesitaría otro tipo de tratamiento teórico-metodológico, nos proponemos observar la construcción discursiva de la seguridad que subyace en ellos y las consecuencias que, siguiendo las hipótesis de la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague, esto conlleva. El artículo se estructura en tres partes. En el primer apartado, se realiza un breve acercamiento a la evolución de la investigación sobre seguridad en el campo de las Relaciones Internacionales y a la teoría de la securitización elaborada por la Escuela de seguridad de Copenhague en los años noventa. En el segundo apartado, se describe el contexto de crisis sanitaria global y, en concreto, en el caso de España, junto con los procesos de securitización que la acompañan. En tercer lugar, se presentan los documentos examinados y la operacionalización que permite su análisis. Posteriormente, se aborda la discusión sobre los resultados y las conclusiones.Alternate abstract:The aim of this article is to present a theoretical-methodological proposal based on a model of analysis from the Copenhagen School of Security Studies, which incorporates the examination of legislative texts into the study of securitization processes. With this objective, we propose an approach to the study of the securitization of the Covid-19 pandemic through the comparative analysis o two texts that have given legislative coverage to the management of this health crisis in Spain. The text of (1) Organic Law 4/1981 on the states of alarm, exception and siege;and the text of (2) Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for managing the pandemic. After the publication of Security:A New Framework For Analysis (Buzan et al.l997), numerous investigations have used the securitization analysis model of the Copenhagen School of Security Studies to study security policies on phenomena such as migratory movements (Müller and Gerbauer, 2021), the climate emergency, or the health crisis of Covid-19 by examining the texts published on social media (Karyotis et al., 202l),or the analysis of the audiences (Bengtsson and Rhinard, 2019) or political discourses (Kuleteva and Clifford, 2021). Securitization theory holds that what gives an issue the status of threat results from an interaction between an actor, whether it is a state, an organization, or the media, and which tries to define a certain problem as an existential threat, and an audience that accepts or rejects this attempt. Under this premise, security is considered a social construct, which has enormous consequences when it comes to its study.The analysis of the security agenda no longer consists of evaluating those threats considered real, but rather aims at the communicative processes through which actors and audiences agree to securitize an issue. The contributions of Balzacq (2005), Salter (2008) and Stritzel (2007;20l2), among others, have also broadened the objects of study of securitization, which have ceased to be exclusively texts of a political nature communicated in a linear manner to incorporate also the audience as an agent that interacts and participates in the creation of the securitizing discourse, the performance associated with the execution of the discourse or the interactivity of the discourse in socio-digital networks. However, despite this diversification in the approach to the study of securitization, most research continues to focus on texts belonging to political or media discourse.There is an absence of analysis of securitization in other types of texts, such as those of a legislative nature which are also interesting to study within the framework of these processes.That is, texts that, in many cases, give legislative coverage to the application of security policies and could represent the legal crystallization of previous political-media discourses. That said, given the legal nature of the texts examined in this article, it is important to make clear that the analysis proposed is, following the model of the Copenhagen School, a discursive analysis. This article does not carry out a legal analysis of the documents or a study on the legal consequences of the implementation of these laws, a study that would need another theoretical-methodological approach. Without conducting a legal analysis, we propose to observe the discursive construction of security that underlies the texts analyzed and the consequences that, according to the hypothesis of the Copenhagen School, this entails. Thus, the current analysis is about the securitization processes of the Covid-19 crisis.This health crisis has been one of the most disruptive episodes globally in recent decades. The unexpected appearance of the virus and its rapid spread made Covid-19, in just a few weeks, as UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pointed out, the greatest threat to global security. The pandemic surpassed any of the established international protocols, and the lack of multilateral agreements between different countries and measures against the virus showed in turn a lack of global governance to deal with this type of threat. At first sight, we could say that Covid-19, an illness that, being new, poses a threat to the health of the entire world population since most people do not have immunity against it. However, this health crisis is once again a good scenario in which to observe that the threat is perceived and constructed in a very diverse way among the populatio .The study by Kirk (2022) on the securitization of Covid-19 in the United States refers to this. She analyzes the discursive battle between different security narratives about the health crisis in a country where the wearing or not wearing of a mask in public places often becomes an expression of a political position. The delimitation of the object of study to the examination of the texts of the Organic Law 4/1981 on states of alarm, exception, and siege, and (2) the Law 2/2021 of the Basque Parliament on measures for the management of the pandemic, is done for several reasons. In the first place, both texts, of an eminently legal nature, respond to the necessary characteristics to carry out the analysis in accordance with the objective of the study. Secondly, despite the substantial differences that both laws maintain in their preamble and the context of their drafting, the two texts have served as a legal framework for taking measures to deal with similar events, specifically, the crisis health of covid-19. This allows, following the proposal of the Copenhagen School, to contextualize the analysis of the securitization construction of the texts based on these facts. Third, the choice of texts, which share a legal framework, responds to the proposal to carry out an analysis of a state nature, and not an international one, given the prominence of state legislation in the coverage of policies and implementation of the security measures against the covid-19 disease because of the lack of international legal frameworks. The article is structured in three parts. In the first section, a brief theoretical-methodological approach is elaborated on the evolution of security research in the field of International Relations and to the theory of securitization developed bythe Copenhagen School. In the second, the context of the global health crisis and the case of Spain are described together with the securitization processes that accompany it.Thirdly, the documents examined and the operationalization that allows their analysis are presented. Subsequently, the discussion on the results and conclusions is addressed.

Children ‘at risk': a critical content analysis exploring representations of childhood in Canadian media from the first wave to the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

Building upon two previously published research papers exploring Canadian media reporting of childhood in the first wave of the pandemic, this paper investigates how constructions of childhood evolved from the first wave to the fourth wave of the pandemic. This qualitative research is guided by the central research question: Over the span of 2 years, from 2020 to 2022, what changes are evident in discourses reported within media focused on the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic on Canadians under the age of 18 years? Findings from this study suggest that in the fourth wave young people were constructed as innocent victims of pandemic restrictions framed through an adult-centric lens;noticeably absent were representations of young people under the age of 18 in their voices. A key recommendation emerged from this study: any future research investigating the impact of the pandemic on young people under aged 18 years must include their full participation.

From Idleness to the Abolition of Work in Ricardo Talesnik's La Fiaca

This article analyses Ricardo Talesnik's play and film (directed by Fernando Ayala) La fiaca [Idleness] and its critique of the notion of work. Talesnik denounces how modern disciplinary institutions form the workforce and a way-of-life-to-work. He questions the work-system by critiquing the commodity-form, standardised time represented in the money-form, worker subjectivity as a national citizen, and Schuld (debt/guilt). Talesnik's critique is developed when the play's main character performs a "Duchamp-like” strike by refusing to go to work. When analysed with Marx's and Foucault's theories of production and power, La fiaca could be read as a play that supports the abolition of work to question modern life under late capitalism. Therefore, what this play effectively critiques is the commodification of everyday life, which leaves no option but to create another way of life by interrupting the process of capitalist production of value and questioning the primacy of labour. Talesnik's play shows the coercive forces of the capitalist mode of production, but also the institutional framework built to correct anyone who dares to challenge it. This makes La fiaca a crucial intervention that helps us understand current post-work criticism and the present tension between work and social reproduction in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rethinking Visual Arts–Based Methods of Knowledge Generation and Exchange in and beyond the Pandemic

This inaugural special issue of ‘Beyond the Text’ brings together a collection of visual arts (animation, creative and fine art, film, photographs, and zines) produced by children, young people, families, artists, and academics as part of co-created research during the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic. Our aim, in making these pieces available in this new publication format, is to illustrate the potential of visual arts as a form of co-creation and knowledge exchange which can transcend the challenges of researching ‘at a distance’, enable participants and co-researchers to share their stories, and support different ways of knowing for academic, policy, and public audiences. This is not to suggest that such methods offer transparent windows into participants’ worlds. As the reflections from the contributing authors consider, visual arts outputs leave room for audience interpretations, making them vulnerable to alternative readings, generating challenges and opportunities about how much it is possible to know about another and what is ethical to share. It is to these issues of ethics, representation, and voice that this special issue attends, reflecting on the possibilities of arts-based approaches for knowledge generation and exchange in and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

KORONAVIRUS: STOŽER, MEDIJI I DISKURS MILITARIZACIJE U HRVATSKOM DRUŠTVU

Članak je posvećen analizi i interpretaciji specifičnog javno-medijskog diskursa koji se oblikovao oko koronavirus pandemije u Hrvatskoj. Radi se o diskurzivnim formama koje imaju ratno-militaristička obilježja, a koje je moguće detektirati i u iskazima vezanim uz korona krizu. U fokus analize postavljene su izdvojene izjave članova Nacionalnog stožera civilne zaštite Republike Hrvatske, kao specifični komunikacijski dogaðaji, koji nastaju u okviru medijski posredovane komunikacije i modela proizvodnje te potrošnje medijskog sadržaja. U širem smislu, taj je problemski motiv povezan uz sociokulturne prakse upotrebe jezika, posebno u kontekstu reprodukcije moći i ideologije, stoga će se pri analizi definiranih fenomena koristiti teorijski okviri biopolitike i kritičke analize diskursa. Upotreba ratno-militarističkog diskursa u obraćanju medijima i široj javnosti, prepoznatljivo je oblikovala tri društveno-političke funkcije: discipliniranje;podršku Vladi i njezinim odlukama;te homogeniziranje nacije.Alternate :This paper aims to analyse and interpret a specific public-media discourse that was formed in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in Croatia. We traced utterances related to the covid-crises that carried war-and-military features, as a specific discourse. Selected utterances of members of The National Civil Protection Headquarters were the focal point, defined as specific communicative events that emerged within mediated communication, situated between media content production and consumption. In a wider perspective, this was related to sociocultural practices of language use, more specifically to power relations and ideology. Therefore, the theoretical frameworks of biopolitics and critical discourse analysis will be used in the analysis of defined phenomena. The articulation of war-and-military discourse in public communication had three socio-political functions: discipline;public support to the Government and its decisions;and homogenization of the nation.

Videographic experiences in times of pandemic

Video calls, video conferences, video art, video dance, video poetry and thus, with that eagerness to see and hear the other, we live in audiovisual mediation devices that do not stop associating with this or that platform or channel in digital culture. When, in 2020, the situation of social isolation imposed on the world by the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, only the audiovisual image continued to travel between media, to transit in the interstices, across borders, towards the meeting with the other, as a being of passage and of uncertain nature and identities, adrift through networks, whether as an archive or in real time. In this context, it is worth reflecting on video as a media-image and metaphor of contemporary man himself: borderless, nomadic, in constant flux, which, even without being able to transit, surpassed technological mediation, becoming an omnipresence whether in video files or video in real time here we name videonomadism. The phenomenon of telepresence, already experienced, is here expanded to think of the video image as a symbol of the diaspora image, drift. It is about thinking video as a contemporary cultural phenomenon aiming to describe the complexity of the videographic system. For this, we opted for decolonial approaches whose critical stance and contrary to the hegemonic and canonical systems of the history of art and culture, have significantly contributed to the production of other perspectives on phenomena such as media, technology, and art, and by extension as we intend with this research, promote new readings of video art. The basic reasoning was mainly related to the decolonial approach of Latin American authors such as Zulma Palermo [8] and Boaventura de Souza Santos [9], having as object of study, the video Small fragments of a suspension machine with interstices by Paloma Oliveira and Mateus Knelsen who was part of the first Pink Umbrellas Art Residency Festival, curated by artists Mirella Brandi and Mueptemo [12], whose video works are audiovisual site specifics created collaboratively by artist duos and exclusively for the Internet. © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery.

How newspaper images position different groups of people in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic: A social representations approach.

This study examines newspaper photographs related to the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Drawing on social representations theory and positioning theory, we explore social representations and identities related to COVID-19 in mass media using a visual rhetoric analysis. More specifically, we focus on how newspaper photographs construct subjects' positions for different age groups. The data consisted of 4,506 photographs of people published in the two largest Finnish newspapers between 1 January and 31 August 2020. The study identified the following subject positions for the different age groups: (a) children as controlled pupils and joyful players; (b) youth as future-oriented graduates and reckless partygoers; (c) adults as authoritative experts, adaptive professionals, responsible caretakers and active recreationists and (d) elderly people as isolated loners. In addition to echoing the positions of villains, heroes and victims identified in previous studies, the photographs seemed to construct an intergroup divide between adults and the other age groups. Methodologically, this study elaborates the usefulness of the analysis of visual rhetoric in social representations research. Theoretically, we seek to advance the understanding of the role of media, particularly images, in the social construction of knowledge.