Crisis-ready responsible selves: national productions of the pandemic

Orgad, Shani ORCID: 0000-0001-5129-4203 and Hegde, Radha (2022) Crisis-ready responsible selves: national productions of the pandemic. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 25 (3-4). 287 - 308. ISSN 1460-356X

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Abstract

National governments have played a key role in constructing the Covid-19 pandemic through their communications. Drawing on thematic, discursive and visual analyses of Covid-19 campaigns from 12 national contexts, we show how the pandemic has presented governments with unique conditions for articulating and reinforcing nationalism and neoliberalism. The campaigns frame the pandemic as a force that brings the nation together and conjure up notions of national ‘solidarity lite’ while relentlessly authorizing the crisis-ready responsible citizen. In so doing, they reproduce neoliberal rationality by shifting the locus of responsibility from the state and social structures to the individual and re-inscribing gendered and classed notions of responsibility, care and citizenship. Mobilizing national neoliberal narratives enables governments to render the pandemic legible as a crisis while obscuring both the structural injustices that exacerbate the crisis and the structural changes required to address it.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ics
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Authors
Divisions:	Media and Communications
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Date Deposited:	26 Nov 2021 12:03
Last Modified:	28 Oct 2025 21:39
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/112744

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