Posts from the ‘Snapshots’ category

A Snapshot presents the pinpoint analysis of a specific feature of a crisis debate, such as targets of mockery in social media memes or the ‘health broker’ in official Swedish health campaigns, usually drawing on a piece of ongoing scientific discourse research. Its objective is to provide an on-the-spot discourse analysis of crisis construction.

The method of critical reading that applies to snapshots is implied by the chosen discourse approach, more precisely, by the heuristic tools, concepts and methods that the chosen tradition of discourse research has established.

A snapshot analysis is structured along the following elements: a peg that highlights the currency or puzzlement associated with the issue investigated and a brief introduction; a paragraph situating the issue in its broader social-political context; a brief explication of how, by which discourse-analytical concepts or categories the isolated issue of crisis discourse is being investigated; and the summary and discussion of that insights generated by that approach.

While the style may be essayistic, academic and non-academic references are used and made explicit in endnotes. Length: about eight pages or 4000 words max. Below, the Snapshots available on CriDis are listed.

Caught in institutional logic: Swedish public-health campaigns targeting migrants

This blog post discusses public information campaigns directed at socially vulnerable, multilingual communities in Sweden. Based on a study of a health-information campaign from 2015/16, it discusses the tensions between the institutional aim to influence the behaviour of individuals and the practical needs of the target audience. Applying a practice-theoretical approach, I argue that public information campaigns are often stuck in an institutional logic limited by legal, medical and procedural factors and removed from the lived experiences of the target community. Negotiating these contrasting contexts can be facilitated by health brokers.

A reversal mirror of the responsible subject. Chronicles of Italian mainstream representations of anti-vaxxers

While the number of reasons for not getting vaccinated is hard to list, the word No Vax (anti-vaxxer) has become a central signifier in the Italian mainstream media’s lexicon of the crisis management of the pandemic. Since the beginning of the vaccination campaign, Italian media outlets depicted anti-vaxxers as a unitarian subject. These representations, this paper ventures, articulate implicit discourses on anti-vaxxer specular reflection: the responsible citizen. The snapshot analysis provocatively proposes a discourse-governmental-theoretical analysis of selected journalistic representations of anti-vaxxers as the constitutive other, that is, discursive elements aiming at stabilising governmental practices of COVID crisis management.

Targets in Czech Digital Covid-related Humour

The blogpost deals with an analysis of targets in Czech Covid-related digital humour. The material for the study are humorous memes, collected from Czech social media users from December 2019 till February 2021 within a university project, comprising about 1000 samples. The post maps what targets appear in the collected humorous memes, what role in the pandemic situation they are ascribed and what general discourse strategies the construction of targets reflects. The analysis reveals the capacity of humour to create in-group/out-group oppositions and the dominant tendencies of portraying the targets as the ones to blame, as threats, rivals and sheeples.