Book Reviews

Brandon Farnsworth, Anna Jakobsson, and Vanessa Massera, eds. 2021. Taking the Temperature: Crisis, Curating, and Musical Diversity, 2nd edition. Zurich: OnCurating.org.Eckersall, Peter, and Bertie Ferdman. 2021. Curating Dramaturgies: How Dramaturgy and Curating are Intersecting in the Contemporary Arts. New York: Routledge, 201 pp., Ebook available.

Queer Communion

Shivering from top to bottom, we huddle on the narrow sidewalk outside Participant Inc. gallery on Houston Street in New York City. We are masked. As safely as we can manage from the global flows of COVID-19 (because of the virus, regulations in the city necessitate innovative solutions to the prohibition on crowds congregating inside). We are waiting for the three-part performance by Ron Athey and collaborators Hermes Pittakos, Mecca, and Elliot Reed—Performance in 3 Acts—which is staged in relation to the exhibition I curated Queer Communion: Ron Athey, a retrospective of Athey’s now over thirty year performance art career.

Multidisciplinary Approaches to Art and Creativity: Fostering Artistic Exploration in Formal and Informal Settings, Karen Knutson, Takeshi Okada and Kevin Crowley (Eds) (2020)

Review of: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Art and Creativity: Fostering Artistic Exploration in Formal and Informal Settings, Karen Knutson, Takeshi Okada and Kevin Crowley (Eds) (2020) New York: Routledge, 296 pp., ISBN 978-0-81536-188-6, e-book, £33.29

“This Virus is a Common Threat to All Humans”: Discourse Representation of COVID-19 in Selected Newspaper Editorials

Existing studies on viruses with bias for COVID-19 have mainly been carried out from non-linguistic fields. Linguistics-related studies have not examined the media representation of COVID-19 since it is a recent development. This study, therefore, identifies the representational strategies, discourse structures and discourse strategies deployed by selected newspapers in representing COVID-19 and associated participants. Data were retrieved from selected COVID-19-related editorials from four purposively selected countries and continents across the world: New York Times (USA, North America), The Guardian (UK, Europe), China Daily (China, Asia) and The Punch (Nigeria, Africa), published in the early periods of the pandemic, and precisely from January 1 – March 31, 2020. Guided by aspects of van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis on ideological discourse structures, data were quantitatively and qualitatively analysed. The newspaper editorials unusually converged to negatively represent an issue – COVID-19 – because it is largely negatively viewed by all. Ten representational strategies (like economic cankerworm, threat to humans, common enemy), six discourse strategies (like demonising, criminalising, condemnation) and twelve ideological discourse structures (like Actor Description, Authority, Burden) and different participant representations and roles (like solver, potential super spreader) were identified in the study. The newspapers largely set the agenda on the negative representation of the virus and its potential havoc on all facets of human endeavours, thereby giving emotional and informational appeal to all to join hands in earnestly silencing the epidemic. Keywords: COVID-19, media representation, newspaper editorials, discourse strategies, discourse structures