[Air-L] New research on online discourse about COVID in the US

[Gillian Bolsover]

Dear AOIR,

I imagine many of you will be preparing courses for next term and thinking about incorporating issues pertaining to COVID. With this in mind, I wanted to flag up two pieces of work I've recently published concerning discourse about COVID on Twitter in the US.

The first looks at reactions to health misinformation, using Trump's comments about the potential of UV and disinfectant based treatments as a jumping off point:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.05271

The second looks at articulations of different kinds of rights and freedoms (collective vs. individual, negative vs. positive freedoms etc.) in pro- and anti-COVID restriction discourse:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09440

I am hoping to publish two more before the end of the summer, one about balancing risks of systemic racism against risks of disease transmission in the May BLM protests and one about the potential impacts on the November election, using discourse about voting in some of the primaries that occurred this summer.

Best wishes for strength for the madness of the coming term,

--
Dr Gillian Bolsover
Lecturer in Politics and Media<https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/politics/staff/693/dr-gillian-bolsover>
University of Leeds

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C. Goron and G. Bolsover. Engagement or control? The impact of the Chinese environmental protection bureaus’ burgeoning online presence in local environmental governance.
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