Associate Professor and Associate Provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou and Alexandra Papamanoli (MAT ‘21) and have had their paper “COVID-19 representations in political statements: A corpus-driven analysis” accepted for publication in the edited volume: Pandemic and Crisis Discourse. Communicating COVID-19. The book, published by Bloomsbury Publishing, is the first to focus on the global crisis communication that has been generated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This work provides a qualitative corpus-driven analysis of statements made by political actors and policy makers on COVID-19 and investigates how these contribute to framing the pandemic as a public problem. Political statements have been selected as they operate as windows of interpretation for COVID-19. The analysis draws on Gusfield’s theory (1981) on the construction of public problems with insights from literature on the social construction of diseases (Powers & Xiao, 2008). It particularly draws on three key elements: i) problem ownership i.e. who claims a say in defining a problem, ii) causality or which theory of causes behind a problem is publicly espoused and iii) accountability i.e. who is praised or blamed for solving or not the problem (Gusfield, 1981, p. 6). Data for this paper includes 54 statements culled from 77 articles from the World Section of the NY Times’ online edition during the second week of March i.e. 16.3.2020 - 22.3.2020. Preliminary findings establish links between democracy, human rights, government transparency and how COVID-19 is represented. In this context, we also offer an analysis of the public narratives concerning the multiple actors handling the incidence of the virus. Overall, this paper argues that political discourse plays a key role in the construction of COVID-19 framing it as a public problem.