Exploring regimes of "truth" during COVID-19

2020

2020

The News and Media Research Centre specialises in research exploring news consumption, the changing media environment, and the impacts of social and digital media on society. It is the home of the annual Digital News Report Australia. https://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/nmrc NEWS AND MEDIA RESEARCH CENTRE 4 \ CONTENTS About the authors About the News & Media Research Centre Executive Summary Introduction Methodology News and information about coronavirus News fatigue and avoidance News and wellbeing Trust in news and information about COVID-19 Misinformation about coronavirus Understanding and coping with COVID-19 Conclusion References

American Behavioral Scientist, 2022

This issue brings theoretically driven analyses to bear on the COVID-19 pandemic, a development which shines a singularly revealing light on some of the most significant political, cultural, and social trends of the 21st century. Leading off with three explicitly theoretical treatments of the pandemic, this issue directs several complementary theoretical lenses at the early stages of the pandemic as it unfolded in the US and Europe. The initial contributions grapple explicitly with the ways in which social conflicts, social solidarities, and social traumas have been refracted-and in many cases magnified-by the pandemic in terms of moral cultures and forms of communication. The focus then shifts to how risk governance during the pandemic operates in different levels and domains of the social architecture as conceptualized in theoretical treatments of social actorhood pioneered by James Coleman. In the second part of the issue, the theme of politic. The upsurge of politically distinctive protests in the United States related to pandemic restrictions-as well as social and racial inequalities rendered visible by the pandemic-is the subject of the first piece. The final article explores the historical specificity of the many popular mobilizations in relation to the pandemic across the globe and across the political spectrum. In this article, we see how the popular mobilizations vary not only in terms of their political orientation, but in their general orientation toward information and authorityincreasingly crucial issues in a world facing a trust deficit.

Critical Studies on Security, 2021

The designation of, and response to, a political issue as a security challenge is neither self- evident nor inevitable (e.g. Buzan et al 1991). Causes of harm must be constructed or performed as security issues to become thus. Responses to (constructed) challenges, similarly, must be communicated or ‘sold’ to relevant audiences (Holland 2013). This is as true of pandemics as it is of other (better-studied) threats from terrorism to nuclear proliferation or environmental degradation. In this piece, I explore the UK’s discursive response to the COVID-19 coronavirus, paying particular attention to the framing of governmental action within official problematisations of the virus. In so doing, I draw on a recent research project investigating UK political language across the first six months of this crisis.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024

Frontiers in Public Health, 2020

Global pandemics are likely to increase in frequency and severity, and media communication of key messages represents an important mediator of the behavior of individuals in response to public health countermeasures. Where the media places responsibility during a pandemic is therefore important to study as blame is commonly used as a tool to influence public behavior but can also lead to the subjective persecution of groups. The aim of this paper is to investigate where the media places responsibility for COVID-19 in Australia. Specifically, we identify the key themes and frames that are present and observe how they changed over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to government actions and progression of the pandemic. Understanding media representations of the COVID-19 pandemic will provide insights into ways in which responsibility is framed in relation to health action. Newspaper articles from the Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald were sampled between January 20 and March 31 2020 on every second Monday. Factiva was used to identify and download newspaper articles using the following search criteria: "COVID-19" OR coronavirus OR "Wuhan virus" OR "corona virus" OR "Hebei virus" OR "wet market" OR (Wuhan AND virus) OR (market AND Wuhan and virus) or (China AND Virus) or (Novel AND Virus). Articles were imported into Nvivo and thematic and framing analyses were used. The results show that framing of the pandemic was largely based on societal issues with the theme of economic disruption prevalent throughout the study time period. Moral evaluations of the pandemic were infrequent initially but increased co-incident with the first signs of "flattening of the curve." Explicit examples of blame were very rare but were commonly implied based on the causal origin of the virus. The Australian printed media were slow to report on the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition they were reluctant to apportion blame until the end of the study period, after confirmed case rates had begun to slow. This is interpreted as being due to an evaluation of the pandemic risks as low by the media and therefore the tools of othering and blame were not used until after the study period when the actual risks had begun to abate, more consistent with an inquiry than a mediating mechanism.

2020

Effective pandemic management requires a clear and straightforward structure of communication and accountability. Yet the political realities of Canadian federalism preclude this. The fundamental theme of pandemic management in Canada is thus the tension between the need to make clear, coherent, and timely decisions, on the one hand, and the need to involve an exceptionally large array of political actors across different levels of government, on the other. The sudden outbreak of SARS in 2003 exposed several problems in coordinating the public health system. This led to a major restructuring of public health institutions in Canada. The 2009 H1N1 pandemic tested these reforms and identified new issues underlying the coordination of governmental actors. This chapter presents the legal and institutional context within which COVID-19 has emerged, and identifies both lessons learned from the past and the challenges that remain. * McCulloch Professor of Political Science, Dalhousie Univer...

Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2021, 2021

COVID-19, a coronavirus emerging in late 2019, quickly snowballed into a global public health crisis of scale not seen in generations. Crisis, ‘a set of circumstances in which individuals, institutions or societies face threats beyond the norms of routine day-to-day functioning’, is a situation that governments must face as both an objective fact and subjective perception. These dual dynamics of fact and perception have shaped the responses of Australian governments to COVID-19 at both the federal and state level. Whilst there are many ways we can examine the policy process (see Weible and Sabatier’s Theories of the policy process for an excellent introduction), a relevant introductory method to examine the governance of COVID-19 in Australia is the crisis management cycle. This applies the cycle of prevention, preparation, response, and recovery and learning, and points to the role of actors, institutions and policy design, and tools in crisis management across these stages. The chapter demonstrates that crisis evaluation is a tricky and political activity characterised by contested perceptions and complicating evidence.

Puncta Special Issue, 2022

I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space

the thesis – that Covid-19 is a political crisis, and not a health crisis – and that none of the measures curtailing our freedoms are scientifically founded – is supported by three arguments: 1. Covid-19 reveals the utter corruption of the body politic and its media and scientific auxiliaries. They have irrevocably lost all legitimacy and authority. 2. This corruption reflects the crisis of financial capitalism, and the oligarchs’ wish to destroy representative democracy. 3. The political system that is being set-up is totalitarian, that is to say that every aspect of citizens’ lives will be driven by a deadening ideological structure that no longer differentiates between the private and public spheres. This totalitarianism will be fascist and digital.