Discourses in Challenging Times

The public health crisis occasioned by the appearance of the novel coronavirus in 2019 revealed a great deal about how we interact with one another other in the 21st century. As Chen et al. (2023) observe, the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed the nature of social interaction, creating negative impacts and challenges, but also opportunities for progressing how we communicate, as humans. This volume brings together eight articles addressing various aspects of how the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath have been communicated in Italy, the European Union, and the United States. The articles included here investigate topics including linguistic and political aspects of communication about the pandemic, the forums in which such communication took place, as well as specific matters such as vaccinations, facemasks, long Covid, and even climate change. This diversity of subject matter unifies around the authors’ applications of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Thus, across articles we find a unified body of cutting-edge research on how we humans came to (mis)understand the Covid crisis—and continue to do so. Maria Cristina Aiezza asks how advocates and opponents of the Covid vaccine in Italy and the United States made their opinions about the vaccine known to policymakers using the collective action website Change.org . This website allows individuals to sign petitions about an almost infinite range of social and political issues. Aiezza analyzes a corpus of these petitions to understand how people framed their positions on the vaccine. She identifies several cross-national themes that emerge from the petitions: most broadly, communitarianism in pro-vaccine arguments and libertarianism in anti-vaccine arguments. In her article, Silvia Cacchiani focuses on the Italian case to explore the emergence of Italian terms concerning the virus. She emphasizes instances in which the English terms covid and corona were brought into contact with the Italian language. Were Italian grammatical rules followed when Anglicisms were imported into discourses about Covid-19 in Italy? Does the left-hand head principle in Italian (e.g., tassa covid) dominate, or are there instances in which the English right-hand head principle (e.g., covid tax) replaces it? Cacchiani’s detailed semantic analysis reveals how the global nature of the pandemic—and the necessity of international communication during that period—transformed our lives in quotidian ways. Perhaps the pandemic did not just infect people; it may also have had a virulent effect on everyday language. Paolo Donadio focuses his article on how the European Union eventually tried to help manage the Covid-19 crisis long after the “political nationalization” of the pandemic (Wodak 2021). Indeed, as the virus affected some countries much earlier than it did others, national governments were forced to take the lead out of necessity. The EU joined the conversation much later, as it were. Donadio has assembled and analyzed corpora of citizens’ reactions to the EU’s official Tweets and Facebook posts in 2021. What did the EU say, and how did Europeans react? Donadio’s answer to those questions suggest that the EU was in damage-control mode once it began communicating about Covid-19, hoping to disguise its political ineffectiveness by emphasizing economic ramifications of the crisis. Maristella Gatto’s article considers the degree to which Wikipedia was able to communicate accurate information during the pandemic. As early as Fall 2020, the World Health Organization teamed up with Wikimedia Commons for help in disseminating facts and data about Covid-19, as Wikipedia articles can be translated into hundreds of languages. However, the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia articles made the site a prime combat zone in the Covid culture wars. Gatto analyzes how well Wikipedia was able to engage in gatekeeping to maintain what she calls its “generic integrity” concerning Covid-related matters. Communication about facemasks on social media forms the basis of Elena Intorcia’s article. She relies on Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis to collect and analyze reactions on Facebook and Twitter to a May 2022 recommendation that people in New York City return to wearing facemasks indoors as a means of mitigating a surge in cases of Covid-19. The analysis reveals patterns in support for and opposition to the recommendation, as well as the many symbolic meanings attributed to masks and masking. Intorcia uses her analysis as a context for proposing that policymakers use corpora of social media commentary to improve their capacity to communicate effectively about public health concerns. Elisa Mattiello’s work here considers how language has been transformed by the pandemic. Since March 2020, more than a thousand new words—neologisms and nonce words—have arisen in English alone. Mattiello analyzes the emergence of such terminology using a corpus of online newspaper and magazine articles. She finds that new terms emerged in part for the purpose of communicating basic facts about the pandemic, but also in part for more emotional reasons ranging from dark humor to hate speech and endorsement of conspiracy theories. Francesco Meledandri turns his attention to online discussion of Long Covid, i.e. cases of the virus that result in negative long-term effects on health. Using a corpus of nearly 600,000 Tweets from Fall 2022, he works to understand how ordinary people were communicating about Long Covid. Did they emphasize their personal experiences, scientific evidence, or conspiracy theories and fake news? Meledandri’s results reveal the presence of each of these themes in the corpus. The analysis also speaks to how the social media discourse about Long Covid has reflected the broader polarization that defines our present age. Finally, Katherine Russo and Cinzia Bevitori explore communication about Covid-19 and climate change during the Virocene, “a new planetary epoch” that has arisen from the pandemic, exposing humanity’s limited power over nature (Fernando 2020). They focus on the European Union, using a corpus of the EU’s communications between 2020 and 2022. Russo and Bevitori explore whether the virus and its management are reflective of a broader politics—and discourse—of crisis, especially in the context of climate change. This article helps us understand that the very term crisis can be used for different purposes by political actors; sometimes the term is used to present the need for a response, while in other contexts it is used to frame the opportunity for transformation.