This volume investigates mediated lives and media narratives during the Covid-19 pandemic, with Asia as a focus point. It shows how the pandemic has created an unprecedented situation in this globalized world marked by many disruptions in the social, economic, political, and cultural lives of individuals and communities— creating a ‘new normal’. It explores the different media vocabularies of fear, panic, social distancing, and contagion from across Asian nations. It focuses on the role media played as most nations faced lockdowns and unique challenges during the crisis. From healthcare workers to sex workers, from racism to nationalism, from the plight of migrant workers in news reporting to state propaganda, this book brings critical questions confronting media professionals into focus. The volume is of critical interest to scholars and researchers of media and communication studies, politics, especially political communication, social and public policy, and Asian studies.

DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div

We narrate everything. We construct the world around us by telling its stories, shaping the language we use to describe what is happening to us; language that is used and adapted in the media in response to moments of crisis. This language in turn shapes how we see the world. This is what we call 'worldmaking'. When we look for solutions to problems, we so often start by telling stories to each other in our communities, stories that set a crisis in context, relate it to our historical experience, help us to understand it in the context of our local communities and contrast those stories to dominant narratives. In this way, language becomes a physical and material force in our world, through which we construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities. 'Worldmaking in the Time of COVID-19', the project that informs this book, was an early response to the experience of living through the COVID-19 pandemic - intended as a contribution to our collective understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following comparison and analysis of over 1.1 million news articles from 117 countries in twelve different languages, this timely reflection follows the course of this investigation, with three main objectives: - to capture the languages of the early pandemic (January- April 2020); - to offer a transferable methodology for exploring world events in multiple languages; - and to share some of the key findings of researchers. Like all the volumes in the Language Acts and Worldmaking series, the overall aim is two-fold: to challenge widely-held views about language learning as a neutral instrument of globalisation and to innovate and transform language research, teaching and learning, together with Modern Languages as an academic discipline, by foregrounding its unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Specific aims are to: · propose new ways of bridging the gaps between those who teach and research languages and those who learn and use them in everyday contexts from the professional to the personal · put research into the hands of wider audiences · share a philosophy, policy and practice of language teaching and learning which turns research into action · provide the research, experience and data to enable informed debates on current issues and attitudes in language learning, teaching and research · share knowledge across and within all levels and experiences of language learning and teaching · showcase exciting new work that derives from different types of community activity and is of practical relevance to its audiences · disseminate new research in languages that engages with diverse communities of language practitioners.

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis. Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics, environmentalism, citizens’ rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism, and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship between the various social forces that contributed to the ‘Covid narrative’. The subjects analysed here include: the performance of the ‘mainstream’ media, the quality of political ‘messaging’ and argumentation, the securitised state and racism in Brazil, the growth of ‘catastrophic management’ in UK universities, emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media’s attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public life. Delving beneath established political tropes and state rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described as unprecedented and unique, but was in fact comparable to other major global disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical ‘publics’ pursued their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a host of citizens – from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable – suggested that inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order. Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies, politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, and the sociology of health.

This book provides a critical media analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic, using the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel to reveal the deliberate practices of those that have weaponized a deadly, serious disease against the most vulnerable members of society.

Covid-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Responses is one of the first books uniting an international team of scholars to investigate how media address critical social, political, and health issues connected to the 2020-21 COVID-19 outbreak. The book evaluates unique civic challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for media worldwide, exploring pandemic social norms that media promote or discourage, and how media serve as instruments of social control and resistance, or of cooperation and representation. These chapters raise significant questions about the roles mainstream or citizen journalists or netizens play or ought to play, enlightening audiences successfully about scientific information on COVID-19 in a pandemic that magnifies social inequality and unequal access to health care, challenging popular beliefs about health and disease prevention and the role of government while the entire world pays close attention. This book will be of interest to students and faculty of communication studies and journalism, departments of public health, sociology, and social marketing.

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.