“Everything will be all right (?)”: Discourses on COVID-19 in the Italian linguistic landscape

Abstract

The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) focuses on the representations of languages on signs placed in the public space and on the ways in which individuals interact with these elements. Regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, and transgressive discourses, among others, emerge in these spaces, overlapping, complementing, or opposing each other, reflecting changes taking place and, in turn, influencing them. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of life, including cities, neighborhoods, and spaces in general. Against this background, the study of the LL is fundamental not only to better understand the ways in which places have changed and how people are interpreting and experiencing them but also to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 discourses since the pandemic broke out. This contribution aims to investigate how and in what terms the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the Italian LL, considered both in its entirety, as a single body that, regardless of local specificities, responded to and jointly reflected on the shared shock, and specifically, assuming the city of Florence as a case study. The data collected in the three main phases of the pandemic include photographs of virtual and urban LL signs and interviews, which were analyzed through qualitative content analysis with the aim of exploring citizens' perceptions and awareness of changes in the LL of their city. The results obtained offer a photograph of complex landscapes and ecologies, which are multimodal, multi-layered, and interactive, with public and private discourses that are strongly intertwined and often complementary. Furthermore, the diachronic analysis made it possible to identify, on the one hand, points in common with the communication strategies in the different phases, both at a commercial and regulatory level. On the other hand, strong differences emerged in the bottom-up representations, characterized in the first phase by discourses of resilience, tolerance, hope, solidarity, and patriotism, and in the second and third phases by disillusionment, despair, and protest.

Commentary: How to have agency in a pandemic

“…Often different names come refer to the same thing, or separate names need to be assigned to different dimensions of that thing. New diseases, especially when they reach epidemic proportions, are inevitably accompanied by what Banga and Bellinzona ( 2023 ) refer to as “terminological pandemics” or what Treichler ( 1999 ), writing about AIDS, called “epidemics of signification”, that spread as scientists, politicians, journalist and ordinary people try to make sense of the new malady and develop a language with which to talk about it.…”

“…One of the most powerful ways that language (re)frames people's understanding and experience of agency is in the use of metaphor. Metaphorical language was so pervasive during the pandemic that it is touched upon, at least implicitly, in every one of these articles, Bafort et al ( 2023 ), for instance, talking about how journalists discredited government responses to COVID by comparing them to failed responses to terrorist attacks, Kania ( 2022 ) discussing how different “inappropriate” names for the virus connected it to different domains of experience (e.g., animals and geography), and Banga and Bellinzona ( 2023 ) describing some of the visual metaphors that featured in the linguistic landscape of Italy during lockdowns. It is in the papers by Giorgis et al and Wilding et al, however, that metaphorical language is taken up most explicitly and directly linked to issues of power, control and agency.…”

“…Without a doubt, the paper that engages most fully with notions of distributed agency and affect is the study of the pandemic landscapes of Florence by Banga and Bellinzona, in which they join in a long tradition of considering the affective dimensions of physical environments, from the “affective turn” in Linguistic Landscape studies which they mention (Milani and Richardson, 2021 ), to other work using concepts such as “affective atmospheres” (Anderson, 2009 ) and “affective geographies” (Jones et al, forthcoming; O'Grady, 2018 ). In their description of the streets of Florence at different stages of the pandemic, Banga and Bellinzona show not just how the physical environment became a canvas upon which the collective “shock” of residents was expressed, but also came to function itself as an agent, “structuring the affective affordances and positions of individuals and groups (Wee and Goh, 2020 , p. 139, cited in Banga and Bellinzona, 2023 )”. Rather than just seeing agency as enabled and constrained by institutional and relational structures, there is a sense in the descriptions they provide of the streets of Florence of agency emerging out of “atmospheres” which are collectively formed from the countless “affective-discursive practices” (Wetherell, 2015 p. 160) of the city's residents, atmospheres that have concrete material consequences on people's behavior and sense of self-efficacy, either creating space for acts of solidarity and charity or of overwhelming people with feelings of rancor and despair.…”

“…Robinson et al ( 2023 ), for example, examine how agency the loss of agency was lexically and grammatically encoded in the way people talked about regulation; Wilding et al ( 2023 ) show how older adults in isolation negotiated their loss of agency through their use of metaphors, and Cowie et al ( 2022 ) describe the ways people coped with the disrupted relationship between structure and agency that came from forced immobility through the production of chronotopic discourse. In others, attention to the issue of agency is more implicit, though no less central, Tragel and Pikksaar ( 2022 ), for instance, focusing on how relationships of authority and solidarity were constructed in regulatory discourses about mask wearing, Bafort et al ( 2023 ) addressing mediatized debates about personal freedom and privacy associated with COVID-19 telephone contact tracing, Kania ( 2022 ) discussing how practices of naming COVID-19 in media discourse revealed underlying ideological projects to assign responsibility for the pandemic to radicalized others, Giorgis et al ( 2023 ) documenting the ways metaphors of warfare used by the governments functioned both as calls to action and constraints on agency in different countries, and Banga and Bellinzona ( 2023 ) exploring how municipal spaces became arenas in which negotiations among regulatory and transgressive discourses played out. In all of these treatments of the pandemic, discourse is presented as the primary means through which agency was claimed and constrained, power was exercised and resisted, and responsibility was assigned and denied.…”

“…They are, in fact, mutually constitutive. “The enacting of agency”, he writes (2004, p. 454), “its coming into being—relies on and simultaneously affects the encoding—how human action is depicted through linguistic means”, a point that is made abundantly clear in a number of the papers in this collection, from the way the encoding of agency on public signs (see Tragel and Pikksaar, 2022 ; Banga and Bellinzona, 2023 ) provides people with the means to manage social relationships and enact or resist regulations, to the ways the encoding of agency in people's everyday talk can sometimes function as a means of reclaiming agency or challenging those who seek to constrain us (see Cowie et al, 2022 ; Robinson et al, 2023 ; Wilding et al, 2023 ).…”