Exploring pandemic metaphors in educational contexts: a survey on the language of teachers and educators in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

This study aimed to explore how metaphors were used to interpret the pandemic and to address its challenges in primary and secondary schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy. A questionnaire was administered to educators and teachers to understand how languages, images, and metaphors were used by themselves and their students to talk about the pandemic and their experiences of living with it. The goal of the questionnaire was to guide critical reflection and encourage more informed language choices. While the existing literature points out the alleged overuse of war metaphors and military frames in public discourse, our findings show that war metaphors are relatively frequent, with other metaphorical frames widely used by teachers and educators to foster resilient attitudes in students. Moreover, in their professional contexts, teachers and educators mostly use metaphorical frames involving resilient attitudes. Our interpretation of the results supports the hypothesis that the purposeful use and deliberate production of metaphors support the choice of metaphors with positive, constructive implications. Finally, some implications of these findings on the theory of metaphor and the methodology of the research are discussed.

Who works on the ‘frontline'? Comparing constructions of ‘frontline' work before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

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.

Transformational contribution of technology to studio culture: experience of an online first-year architecture design studio during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeDesign studios experienced an unprecedented contribution of technology when it came to organizing studios online, as imposed by COVID-19, which requires exploration of its impacts on the main metaphors of education, learning dimensions, and undoubtedly studio culture.Design/methodology/approachIn order to explore the impacts on the key dimensions of learning, a careful investigation was carried out from organizational, instructional, and learner points of view. The investigation utilized thematic analysis of records of pedagogical actions, as well as online communications, performance, and questionnaire responses of students to infer the conclusions. The freshmen architecture students were found to be an important group for study since they had no previous experiences in on-site design studios and will continue their education based on their first-year experiences.FindingsExploration of indicators—including reflective dialogue, retention, transfer of learned information to decisions, processing feedback as an investment in future performance, and self-regulation—as major contributors to design learning revealed that first-year students exhibited strong presence and interaction during online studio, and students' individuality influenced the teaching environment in terms of content and process. Hence, sense of belonging, which is a revamped feature of authentic context and studio culture, expands toward fortification of bottom-up educational frontiers.Originality/valueDeveloping pedagogies with no concern for the unprecedented impacts of the transformative role of technology on fundamental layers of design education will adversely influence students' chances of personal and professional success. The findings in this paper, regarding the transformational impacts of technology on design studio culture, follow investigation of the direction it has led current and can lead future design education. The study provides unique support for crystalizing new teaching and learning opportunities and pedagogical developments.

Discourse Representation of COVID-19 in Editorial Columns in Jordanian Newspapers

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.

From danger to destination: changes in the language of endemic disease during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the beginning of 2022, the word 'endemic' became a buzzword, especially in the UK and the USA, and a kernel for the formation of novel social representations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The word normally refers to a disease which is continuously present, whose incidence is relatively stable and is maintained at a baseline level in any given locality. Over time, 'endemic' migrated from scientific discourse into political discourse, where it was mainly used to argue that the pandemic was over and people now had to learn to 'live with' the virus. In this article, we examine the emerging meanings, images and social representations of the term 'endemic' in English language news between 1 March 2020 and 18 January 2022. We observe a change over time, from the representation of 'endemic' as something dangerous and to be avoided to something desirable and to be aspired to. This shift was facilitated by anchoring COVID-19, especially its variant Omicron, to 'just like the flu' and by objectifying it through metaphors depicting a path or journey to normality. However, the new language of hope and aspiration did not go entirely unchallenged. Our analysis suggests that two competing polemic social representations emerged: one of endemicity as hope and aspiration and the other focusing on misguided optimism. We discuss these findings in the context of emerging polarisations in beliefs about the pandemic, politics and disease management.

The Power of Bellicose Rhetoric: Metaphors in the Croatian Public Discourse

The use of metaphors often characterizes contemporary public discourses on various issues. By the same token, metaphors have been used extensively in the discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper examines the war metaphor as a framing and rhetorical device with distinct persuasive potency within the Croatian sociocultural context. The analysis shows that militaristic metaphors were omnipresent in the Croatian public discourse at the beginning of the pandemic. Their dual role, explanatory and persuasive, was instrumental in convincing the public to understand the pandemic and accept the restrictive mandates put in place.

The Use of Animal Metaphors to Reveal Beliefs of Grade Three Namibian Learners Who Experienced Mathematics Learning Difficulties During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This chapter examines the use of animal metaphors to explore the beliefs of six grade three learners in a rural Namibian school. The study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The learners had been observed by their teacher and had been found to be experiencing difficulties in learning mathematics. The teacher, therefore, labelled the learners as experiencing mathematics learning difficulties (MLD) and believed they were not mathematically talented. The grade three learners had missed out on some essential basic mathematical competencies in the previous grades due to a lockdown during the pandemic, unplanned school closures, and the implementation of a rationalised syllabus/COVID-19 emergency curriculum. Using animal metaphors, a qualitative research method was used to collect data through semi-structured interviews and learners' drawings. Findings revealed that learners associated mathematics with dangerous animals or situations, and they believed mathematics to be a difficult subject to learn. The learners' beliefs indicated that they struggle to learn mathematics;however, all the learners considered knowledge of the subject an essential part of life. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

An analysis of COVID-19 disease perceptions and metaphors of nurses working in COVID-19 intensive care units

Objectives: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is seen not only as a disease, but it is also defined by a series of met- aphors: mysterious, evil, an invisible enemy, an insidious danger, and a democratic virus. This study was conducted to analyze the nurses' perceptions of COVID-19 through metaphors.Methods: This qualitative research was planned as a descriptive phenomenological approach. Twenty-eight nurses working in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) participated in the study. The metaphor-based data collection pro- cess was carried out with five open-ended questions. The data were analyzed through a thematic analysis. The Consol- idated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research Checklist was used to analyze this study.Results: Most military and fatigue related to the time nurses work in intensive care;Hero and nightmare of patient care with COVID-19;distance and restlessness in family relationships;their mental health darkroom and fatigue;COVID-19 as an insidious enemy and infinity. A total of 128 metaphors were produced.Conclusion: Working during the COVID-19 epidemic, COVID-19 ICU nurses exhibit unfavorable approaches toward their jobs, family relationships, and mental health. Improving the working conditions of ICU nurses and considering their desires will help contribute to a favorable direction.

Figurative Language Used by Australian Facebookers During COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigated the metaphorical speech acts used by Australian commentators on Facebook during COVID-19. The sample contained 50 Facebook comments that were analyzed qualitatively. The study adopted Searle taxonomy of speech acts, namely, directive, assertive, expressive, commissive, and declarative. This helped in identifying the different functions of the metaphorical speech acts. Moreover, Austin taxonomy of speech act forms, namely, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary, was adopted. The findings revealed that the most common types of metaphors that were used by the Australian commentators were war and conflict metaphors, followed by psychological status metaphors and irony metaphors. The study found that war and conflict metaphors were the most commonly used forms of speech by the commentators. This is in alignment with the literature that also highlights how the advent of a crisis, such as COVID-19, results in excessive use of war and militarized metaphors. The study found that the most common speech act was directive, while expressive was the least common form used by Australian commentators during the COVID19 pandemic.

Medicine Is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje (review)

Set in the twenty-first century, The Last Man was an apocalyptic story of a pandemic spreading around the world, causing the near elimination of the human population, almost literally to the last person standing. The links between public health and military medicine at this time are well-known and exemplified by Edmund Parkes's Manual of Practical Hygiene (1864). The claim that such literature had a "broader reach” in spreading the martial metaphor in medicine is questionable, without more evidence of impact.

Primary preservice teachers' exploration of possible selves through narrated metaphors during the COVID-19 pandemic

This study examines how primary-level preservice teachers (PSTs) in an online asynchronous course (co-)constructed and (re)negotiated their professional identities through the use of metaphors in online asynchronous courses in the U.S. By using metaphors and narrating their lived experiences in relation to their chosen metaphors, participants expressed their desired and feared identities. Their metaphorical expression of identities reflects the complex interplay between participants' construction of their possible selves within the temporal, social, and spatial context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Individual and collaborative metaphor-based reflections provided a reflective space for PSTs to explore professional becoming and future possibilities at the interface between their sense of agency and their situated temporal, spatial, and social context, even within asynchronous online teacher education courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge 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.)

Of Fear and Strangers: A History of Xenophobia by George Makari (review)

Sigmund Freud in his "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921) outlined his take on this after World War I. British psychotherapists, including some of his English followers such as Wilfried Trotter, appropriated a psychology of difference popularized by Gustave Le Bon to define the valorous "Tommy" crusading against the inherently evil "Boche." In his 1921 essay, Freud began with the claim concerning collective behavior that had long been established in the psychological literature of the late 19th century—that "a group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it." In the first of many striking moments in this book, Makari locates the modern origin of xenophobia—and it is not where we expected to find it: the social fascination with the "phobias" had its origin in 19th-century medicine, which quickly devolved into social metaphor, as such diagnostic categories of behavior tend to do rather quickly. Makari begins his book locating his own discomfort with being seen as "different" and trying to understand his own family, Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Ottoman Lebanon, whose trek to the United States created (as many of us know from our own family experience) "better" Americans, initially struggling as peddlers and then establishing themselves in Texas as "real" Americans.

THE USE OF METAPHOR IN DEFINING THE PANDEMIC PHENOMENON

Although pandemics are perceived as scientific and technical problems, their multi-layered political implications trigger an ideologyladen debate. In this paper, we argue that in the face of the upheavals caused by Covid-19, a considerable part of the political and media systems has used narratives rooted in neo-nationalist and neo-liberal ideologies. On the one hand, neo-nationalism is visible through the portrayal of stereotypical « others » in mainstream media. On the other hand, the health emergency has tested and will continue to test institutions and their ability to find and implement solutions that minimise harm without restricting individual freedoms. Those entrusted with the institutional and political responsibility to inform the public once again communicated on the event using the primal rhetorical figures. First in China, then in Italy and Europe, and finally throughout the world, politicians, journalists, doctors, economists and opinion leaders have defined the health emergency as "war". The metaphor of war has been used and abused from the beginning, and the first and most vocal disseminators of the term « war » and its associated concepts have been politicians. This paper proposes an extension of the concept of Orientalism as a possible key to understanding the construction of stereotypical representations of Covid-19 as the 'enemy' and the pandemic as 'war' during the lockdown. Furthermore, it is argued that political positions and conflicts over pandemic measures are not random and nor do they depend on the idiosyncrasy of individuals. Rather, they represent certain material interests and socio-cultural and ideological backgrounds.

Communicable (Literature and Medicine 2013–2018)

People joke about "the before times," but they're not wrong. 2020 is an especially distorting lens, in part I think because things too easily relegated to peripheral vision came suddenly into shockingly clear focus: medical things, sociopolitical things, the fact of human health as an interconnected biocultural compound. Since 2020, surely no one can argue that it's possible to understand health without thinking about history and justice, or to understand disease without thinking about economics and rhetoric. Disease spread by invisible entities through a community or across the globe, exacerbated by social structures, controlled (or not) through public health measures, and made sense of (or not) by cultural rhetorics. Because infection is of course always metaphorical: something has an effect on something else by entering it, by infiltrating or invading it, or instilling itself into it. (Perhaps the positive antonym would be inspires, which we don't use for microbes, though it certainly implies inhalation?) In any case, literature-and-medicine always has in it that tension between invisible pathogens and communicable ideas. Health and suffering are unjustly distributed;health care is practiced within powerfully oppressive social structures;public health is a contradiction in terms when those structures go unquestioned, or when those who speak for it use their words less effectually than they might.

Chaplaincy Perspectives on the Role of Spirituality in Australian Health and Aged Care.

The aim of this study was to explore Australian chaplains' views of spirituality. Semi-structured online interviews were conducted with 16 participants. Participants relied heavily on metaphors and analogies to describe spirituality. Four inter-related themes were identified through reflexive thematic analysis: (1) The core of spirituality: spirituality as a source of meaning or belief which leads to connectedness with something greater than oneself; (2) A function of spirituality: spirituality empowers people to cope in a crisis, by providing motivation, hope and comfort; (3) The experience of spiritual crisis: admission to hospital or residential care can lead to existential struggle; and (4) The spiritual practice: of holding space between struggle and growth. Greater understanding of the theoretical basis of their work may allow chaplains to offer more in the therapeutic space.

Metaphor analysis of the COVID-19 public health emergency on Chinese national news media

COVID-19 poses a threat to social stability globally, which requires efficacious governance and public cooperation. To handle the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese national news media have mobilized the public to identify and collaborate with the nation. This paper investigates how war, chess, and examination metaphors, nation personification, and metonymies (i.e. the part representing the whole) are utilized in news reports and editorials to achieve the purpose. We adhere to the theoretical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis and analyze 156 articles that are sourced from Xinhua News Agency and People's Daily from January 22, 2020 to February 13, 2020. Besides demonstrating the specific entailments of these metaphors and metonymies, we also involve scenarios such as the 'Heroic Fight' scenario and the 'Harmonious Family' scenario. Those framing devices function to evoke patriotism and reinforce national identity by activating collective, historical, and cultural memories and evaluating in-group members positively.

Metaphors of pandemic discourse (on the material of German media)

This article focuses on the analysis of metaphorical representations of the coronavirus pandemic in texts selected by continuous sampling from German-language media. The methodological basis of the research is the theory of conceptual metaphor, as well as the Russian theory of metaphorical modeling, which allow us to single out universal metaphorical models that are in line with the Zeitgeist and are part of the national picture of the world. Pandemic discourse was selected as the research space. It is understood as a media supertext or as a collection of media texts united by one topic and aimed at reflecting events associated with the pandemic. Further, the article examines predictable metaphorical models - the military model with an extensive system of slots representing most of the elements of "military" actions aimed at combating the virus;the disaster model (tsunami, storm, fire) showing the attitude to the virus as to a dangerous and uncontrollable phenomenon;the ambivalent road model (the road from the pandemic, on the one hand, and the road along which the virus is walking around the world, on the other);the legal model focusing attention on the protest part of the discourse;the zoomorphic model;the theatrical-game model. The author shows an example of the interaction of units of different metaphorical models for the implication of certain nuances of meaning. The conceptual metaphors that fill the slots of these models show the complex moral and psychological state of society and an ambiguous social attitude towards the pandemic reality. The final part of the article describes living metaphors, born as a response to the anxiety of the situation and fear, realizing unconventional meanings, to some extent a carnival attitude to what is happening, speaking ironically and/ or describing everything in a plain, upfront way. A striking linguistic fact in this category of metaphors is serial metaphors, which form large word families and, by one feature, characterize a number of objects or phenomena of the new reality. Attention is drawn to complex metaphors, the semantics of which is made up of a pun on the direct meanings of the components. The conclusion states the high degree of emotional impact of metaphors, the dynamism of the metaphorical picture of the pandemic reality, its dependence on many objective and individual factors, as well as on ideological reasons. The prospect of the research is seen in the description of anthropomorphic metaphorical images of pandemic discourse of the corona-humoristic texts.

Host control by SP beta phage regulatory switch as potential manipulation strategy

This research studies the aesthetics of organisations and identifies, from a semiotic perspective, the elements of the aesthetics of organisations and their workers' perceptions of them. This research adds to the theoretical development of a new paradigm using a qualitative, retrospective, cross-sectional methodological approach and non-experimental design. To validate the dimensions and variables identified, three empirical research studies were carried out on a sample of 346 people using a semiotic-based method. The study is also quantitative, as the results obtained from the surveys are presented in numerical form in the semiotic matrix, which identifies the dimensions involved in the aesthetics of the organisations. The main contribution of the study is the design of a typology of organisational beauty by which to analyse the aesthetic dimensions of organisations.

'Every one of you is now a soldier': war metaphors in Jordanian official discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this article, we examine the use of war metaphors in Jordanian official discourse on the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21, through an analysis of videos of public statements and media releases made by Jordanian government officials at press conferences and interviews with local media outlets which were disseminated through social media. Against both the linguistic essentialism and the Western-centrism of conventional analyses of (war) metaphors, we demonstrate that Jordanian officials' framing of Covid-19 as a security threat is not just a function of the rhetorical appeal of militarised discursive responses to the pandemic, but also aligns closely with existing ideologies of the militarisation and securitisation of public life. The mobilisation of metaphor in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic should thus be understood in relation to the specific discourses that pervade the communicative channels through which it is distributed. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Contemporary Levant is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd 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.)

COVID-19 as a Framing Device for Environmental Protest: The ECOSYSTEM HEALTH Metaphor

This paper focuses on the ECOSYSTEM HEALTH metaphor which has long prevailed in environmental communication. Following the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we propose a contrastive view on the use of the ECOSYSTEM HEALTH metaphor in environmental discourse: we distinguish the metaphorical expressions used before the pandemic from the ones used during the pandemic. This distinction is aimed at identifying the new arguments promoted by COVID-19 metaphors. The publications released by the international environmental organization Extinction Rebellion are of particular interest. Through a detailed analysis of texts published between January and July 2020, we show that the impact of COVID-19 has modified our understanding of the ECOSYSTEM HEALTH metaphor. While environmentalists used to depict the environment as a SICK BODY prior the pandemic, the occurrences discussed below demonstrate that COVID-19 metaphors highlight the human characteristics associated with the source domain HEALTH.