"Lessons from the COVID-19 global pandemic are vitally important to learn so as to maintain trust in public health institutions. With great timeliness and an admirable global reach, this edited collection brings forward the critical role played by communications to the task of trust-building in times of crisis".
-Terry Flew, Professor of Digital Communication and Culture, The University of Sydney.
This edited collection, follows on from 'Communicating COVID-19: Interdisciplinary Perspectives' (2021) and brings together different scholars from around the world to explore and critique the ongoing advances of communicating COVID, two years into the pandemic.
Pandemic life has become familiar to us, with all its disruptions and uncertainties. In the second year of COVID, many societies emerged well attuned to new waves of infections, while others, having initially demonstrated 'gold standard' responses, regressed, either through a premature end to public health restrictions or challenges around vaccine rollouts. In many countries, bitter social divisions have arisen over mask-wearing, lockdowns, quarantine and vaccination.
To better understand the ever evolving communicative landscape of COVID-19, this collection shares updated perspectives from the disciplines of media and communication, journalism, public health and primary care, sociology, and political and behavioural science, addressing the major issues that have confronted communicators, including vaccine hesitancy, misinformation, and the mobilisation of community driven communication responses as restrictions eased in various parts of the world.
Monique Lewis is a communications scholar, sociologist, and lecturer in media and communication at Griffith University, Australia.
Eliza Govender is Associate Professor and Head of Department of the Centre for Communication, Media and Society (CCMS), University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
Kate Holland is Senior Research Fellow in the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, Australia.
Chapters 13, 18, and 19 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.
