Announcing Dr. John Pollock’s newest publication, “COVID Communication.”

“Is our resistance to COVID-19 a ‘fight’ or a ‘game of chess’? A ‘football game’ or a ‘nightmare’?

Do we need a ‘battle plan’ or a ‘map’? ‘COVID Communication: Exploring Pandemic Discourse’ calls for more attention to the metaphorical choices we make, pointing to the dangers of framing disease response as aggression.

This new book calls attention to the potential of metaphors to enable more community-oriented approaches to disease response.

When we see healing as a journey rather than as a war, perhaps we are less likely to frame other countries as our enemies and more likely to accept that recovery (both at individual and societal scales) will be slow, meandering, and require cooperative action.  Metaphors structure thought, so we ought to metaphorize with attention and intention.”

Dr. Pollock

 

What’s it all about?

Can our language choices affect the way we react to the threat of disease? My most recent co-edited book addresses that question. “COVID Communication” (Springer, 2023) focuses on how we understand COVID-19―medically, socially, and rhetorically. Given the expectation that other flu pandemics will occur, it stresses the importance of examining how the public response is shaped in the face of global health emergencies.

It considers questions such as how can pandemic language both limit and expand our understanding of disease as biomedical, social, and experiential? In what ways can health communication be improved through the study and application of rhetoric and the health humanities? COVID Communication fills a gap in the pandemic literature by promoting interdisciplinary analysis of communication methods, realized through a health humanities approach. It centers human experience and culture within conversations about the biological reality of a pandemic.