Abstract:The COVID-19 pandemic has augmented discourses of individual citizen responsibility for collective health. This article explores how British Columbia, Canada’s widely praised COVID-19 communication participates in the development of neo-communitarian “active citizenship” governmentalities focused on the civic duty of voluntarily taking responsibility for the health of one’s community. We do so by investigating how public health updates from BC’s acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry articulate t… Show more
“…According to Tworek et al [2020], BC's response aimed "to cultivate trust (among citizens as well as between government and public)" to strengthen public solidarity, collaboration, and resilience [p. 59]. As we have argued in our previous study of BC's COVID-19 communication, the province's strategy enacted a (neo)communitarian ideology focused on citizens' civic duty to voluntarily take responsibility for the health of their community [Spoel, Lacelle & Millar, 2021]. In this paper, we investigate more fully the role of the first-person plural within this pro-social rhetoric.…”
Section: Case Study Contextmentioning
confidence: 96%
“…Pro-social messaging asks individuals to act for the good of others or the community[Tworek et al, 2020, p. 105]. Neo-communitarianism combines a neoliberal ideology of self-responsibilization with a communitarian ideal of active citizenship and community values[Spoel et al, 2021].3 Within these excerpts, there are 2061 occurrences of "we" compared to 215 occurrences of "I" and 384 occurrences of "you." Within 10 randomly selected updates from our corpus, "we" occurs on average 83 times per update compared to an average of 9 times for "I" and 20 for "you.…”
This paper investigates the multiple meanings and functions of the pronoun “we” in COVID-19 public updates by British Columbia's acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry in 2020. Our rhetorical case study shows how “we” contributes to Henry's relational ethos by attempting to foster a communal identity with her implied audience while also distinguishing public health expertise, actions, and authority from citizens' knowledge and actions. Ambiguous uses of “we” blur the line between the knowledge and responsibilities of “we” in public health and “we” as citizens. Overall, our rhetorical analysis demonstrates the significant but ambivalent role this pronoun can play in building relations of social trust among citizens, experts, and institutions within public health and science communication contexts and it suggests the importance of judicious pronoun usage when communicators strive to foster these relations.
“…According to Tworek et al [2020], BC's response aimed "to cultivate trust (among citizens as well as between government and public)" to strengthen public solidarity, collaboration, and resilience [p. 59]. As we have argued in our previous study of BC's COVID-19 communication, the province's strategy enacted a (neo)communitarian ideology focused on citizens' civic duty to voluntarily take responsibility for the health of their community [Spoel, Lacelle & Millar, 2021]. In this paper, we investigate more fully the role of the first-person plural within this pro-social rhetoric.…”
Section: Case Study Contextmentioning
confidence: 96%
“…Pro-social messaging asks individuals to act for the good of others or the community[Tworek et al, 2020, p. 105]. Neo-communitarianism combines a neoliberal ideology of self-responsibilization with a communitarian ideal of active citizenship and community values[Spoel et al, 2021].3 Within these excerpts, there are 2061 occurrences of "we" compared to 215 occurrences of "I" and 384 occurrences of "you." Within 10 randomly selected updates from our corpus, "we" occurs on average 83 times per update compared to an average of 9 times for "I" and 20 for "you.…”
This paper investigates the multiple meanings and functions of the pronoun “we” in COVID-19 public updates by British Columbia's acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry in 2020. Our rhetorical case study shows how “we” contributes to Henry's relational ethos by attempting to foster a communal identity with her implied audience while also distinguishing public health expertise, actions, and authority from citizens' knowledge and actions. Ambiguous uses of “we” blur the line between the knowledge and responsibilities of “we” in public health and “we” as citizens. Overall, our rhetorical analysis demonstrates the significant but ambivalent role this pronoun can play in building relations of social trust among citizens, experts, and institutions within public health and science communication contexts and it suggests the importance of judicious pronoun usage when communicators strive to foster these relations.
“…Historically, these conceptions have been socially produced by political powers to exclude women, people of colour, persons with mental illness, and others (Atterbury & Rowe, 2017). As such, common goods of health may be denied to those who are perceived as outside the dominant group(s) or not meeting the roles and responsibilities of civic participation by those who rule (Atterbury & Rowe, 2017;Spoel et al, 2023).…”
Section: Common Goods For Health and Health (In)securitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Historically, these conceptions have been socially produced by political powers to exclude women, people of colour, persons with mental illness, and others (Atterbury & Rowe, 2017). As such, common goods of health may be denied to those who are perceived as outside the dominant group(s) or not meeting the roles and responsibilities of civic participation by those who rule (Atterbury & Rowe, 2017; Spoel et al, 2023). Determinations of the common good are often constructed and organized to exclude the needs, interests, and choices of citizens deemed to be dependent (Atterbury & Rowe, 2017, p. 274).Therein lies a prejudice towards those deemed ‘dependent’ (e.g., older persons, ill persons, children), or engaged in unpaid labour, as paid labour is assumed to be part of being an ‘active’ citizen (Cunningham‐Burley, Backett‐Milburn, & Kemmer, 2006).…”
Section: Common Goods For Health and Health (In)securitymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Based on these premises, our research aims were to explain mechanisms of citizenship connected to the identity of immigrant groups, and to their self‐determination and agency to access common goods of health during the first wave of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19). Spoel, Lacelle, and Millar (2023) suggest public health discourse in British Columbia, Canada, during the COVID‐19 pandemic (first wave) compelled a ‘communal ethos’ that ‘increased the burden of personal responsibility for health beyond norms of self‐care’; moreover, presumptions of this identity excluded citizens who lacked the means to fulfil the expectations of ‘good covid citizenship’ (p. 770). Aligned with this, we suggest immigrants engaged in ethopolitics to make sense of public health discourse and engage in, what Rose (2001) describes as, a ‘will to health.’…”
Section: Health Citizenship and A Will To Healthmentioning
One's health security (i.e., the ability to minimize risks and respond to public health threats) is a conferred right of citizenship but individuals construct identities during the process of securing their health. However, how this occurs, in relationship to the state, remains largely implicit or taken‐for‐granted. The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19)' provided a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between oneself and governing social norms of health citizenship. We drew on secondary analysis of data from a previous (published) qualitative descriptive study that was conducted during May to September 2020 of COVID‐19, to explore 72 immigrants' experience (from 21 countries) of health security in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada. Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and analysed using critical realism. The majority of participants were women. We demonstrate how individuals implicitly engaged in ‘extra’ work—gendered and driven by mechanisms of good citizenship—connected to the will to health, against ethopolitical work to regulate risks, of and for themselves, in public discourse. Public discourse tended to follow racialized hegemonic norms, which also reproduced systemic cultural racism. We argue that empathetic understanding of this process is conducive to enhancing one's resistance to stereotypes, and to bolstering immigrants' resilience to seeking health security during public health emergencies.
The promotion of health literacy was a key public health strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the role of social networks and relationships for support with health literacy-related tasks in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is scarcely understood. Moving beyond traditional notions of health literacy, which focus on individual skills and knowledge, this study uses the concept of distributed health literacy to explore how individuals make meaning of and respond to health literacy and make their literacy skills available to others through their relational and socially situated and lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on 89 semi-structured interviews conducted in three European countries (Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland) between October and December 2021, we found narratives of stabilization, hybridization, and disruption that show how health literacy concerning COVID-19 is a complex social construct intertwined with emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses distributed among individuals, communities, and institutions within socioeconomic and political contexts that affect their existence. This paper opens new empirical directions to understand the critical engagement of individuals and communities toward health information aimed at making sense of a complex and prolonged situation of uncertainty in a pandemic.
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