This book details how the processes of communication are affected by the presence of a pandemic and establishes a research agenda for those effects across the broad field of communication studies. Through contributions from experts in communication subdisciplines such as crisis, organizational, interpersonal, health, intergroup, and intercultural, this book provides the reader with a comprehensive view of the emerging field of study "pandemic communication." Each chapter has four primary objectives to: (1) define critical issues for pandemic communication from its subdiscipline’s perspective, (2) examine how communication varies during pandemic(s), (3) provide examples of how pandemic(s) havefor affected communication, and (4) propose a research agenda to build pandemic communication theory. This book is suited to undergraduate or post-graduate courses or modules in communication studies across a variety of subdisciplines as well as a reference for researchers in the subject.

This book examines how we design and deliver health communication messages relating to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. We have experienced major changes to how the public receives and searches for information about health crises over the last twelve decades with the ongoing shift from text/broadcast-based to digital messaging and social media. Both health theories and practices are examined as it applies to testing, tracking, hoarding, therapeutics, and vaccines with case studies. Challenges to communicate about health to diverse audiences (including the science illiterate) and across (both Western and developing economies) have been complicated by politics, norms and mores, personal heuristics, and biases, such as mortality salience, news avoidance, and quarantine fatigue. Issues of economic development and land use, trade and transportation, and even climate change have increased the exposure of human populations to infectious diseases making risk and resilience more pressing. The book has been designed to support health communicators and public health management professionals, students, and interested stakeholders and university libraries.

This book addresses the global need for effective, ethical and evidence-based health communication, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights how health communication can facilitate effective responses to disease threats, build vaccine literacy and strengthen the public's trust in governments and health institutions. The volume offers a variety of communication perspectives from leading international experts, with particular attention to the interrelated subjects of vaccine literacy and trust. Chapters present conceptual frameworks, research evidence, and novel ideas about ways to build trust, craft and target communication interventions, leverage digital technologies, integrate public health and health systems, apply health diplomacy, engage multiple sectors, and foster a vaccine-protected world. Vaccine Communication in a Pandemic will be an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners of communication studies, public health and health literacy, health and public policy, media advocacy, media studies and mass communication. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Health Communication: International Perspectives.

This book examines the challenges of communicating risk and crisis messages during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide recommendations for managing future global health crises. Given that outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics are global crises that require global solutions, the book suggests that the world community needs to build resilient crisis management institutions and message management systems. Through international case studies, in-depth interviews, textual, content, narrative and document analysis, the book provides comprehensive accounts of how normative risk communication strategies were invoked, applied, disrupted, questioned, and changed during the COVID- 19 pandemic. It explores themes including crisis preparedness, outbreak communication, lockdown messages, communication uncertainty, risk message strategies and the challenges of information disorders to show that trust in supranational and national institutions is crucial for the effective management of future global public health crises. A thorough assessment of the multiple challenges faced by public health authorities and audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, this book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and students in the field of Risk, Crisis and Health Communication and Public Health and Disaster Management.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed social interactions. Social distancing policies, lockdowns, and mandatory quarantines have accelerated the technological mediation of communication (e.g. AI-mediated communication, computer-mediated communication) on an unprecedented scale, willingly or otherwise. Many physical activities such as office work, education, and conferences have had to be performed in the online space through social media apps, the metaverse or specialized programs on mobile phones or laptops as part of pandemic control efforts. As a result, digitally mediated channels have become critical for information acquisition and communication across a wide spectrum of human activities such as education, social interaction, entertainment, and commercial activities. Human beings are increasingly reliant on non-human agents, including social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered tools, or smartphone mobile devices for most routine activities, professional communication, and social interactions. As scientific understanding of COVID-19 improves, pandemic restrictions are gradually loosening. However, it remains to be seen whether the pandemic communication paradigm characterized by heavy technological mediation and reliance on non-human agents will also gradually decline, or will the paradigm shift become deeply entrenched with further acceleration of dependency on technological mediation and non-human agents.

This truly interdisciplinary volume brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore changes in the significance of media and communication in the era of pandemic. The book answers two interrelated questions: how media and communication reality changed during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how media and communication were effectively studied during this time. The book presents changes in media and communication in three areas: media production, media content, and media usage contexts. It then describes the theoretical and practical, methodological, technical, organizational, and ethical challenges in conducting research in circumstances of sudden change in research conditions, emergency situations and developing crises. Drawing on various theoretical studies and empirical research, the volume illustrates the principles and results of applying diverse research methods to the changing role of media in a pandemic and offers good practices and guidance to address the problems in implementing research projects in a time of sudden difficulties and challenges. This diverse and interdisciplinary book will be of significance to scholars and researchers in media studies, communication studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

This book explores the connections between risk and responsibilisation in official communication to the public about the global risks of the pandemic and climate change. Our media spheres in the 2020s have been saturated with information about what we should or should not be doing to meet the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Although the ability of risk communication to ‘responsibilise’ the public is central to its functioning in our societies, this aspect has so far been under-investigated in academia. To address this lacuna, Antoinette Fage-Butler develops a discursive approach to risk communication that focuses on the values that are communicated in risk messages. Examples of official risk communication about the pandemic and climate change from national and transnational contexts are analysed and compared, leading to new empirical findings and theoretical insights about the nature of risk and responsibilisation. Fage-Butler also builds on recent stirrings in the evolving field of risk communication that highlight the importance of cultural and value-related factors. Overall, this book will equip researchers with an approach to risk communication that reflects the complexity of today’s global risk challenges. Risk and Responsibilisation in Public Communication will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk communication, public health and environmental studies.

The most comprehensive and up-to-date textbook on public communication campaigns currently available Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns provides students and practitioners with the theoretical and practical knowledge needed to create and implement effective messaging campaigns for an array of real-world scenarios. Assuming no prior expertise in the subject, this easily accessible textbook clearly describes more than 700 essential concepts of public communication campaigns. Numerous case studies illustrate real-world media campaigns, such as those promoting COVID–19 vaccinations and social distancing, campaigns raising awareness of LGBTQ+ issues, entertainment and Hollywood celebrity campaigns, and social activist initiatives including the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter (BLM). Opening with a thorough introduction to the fundamentals of public communication campaigns, the text examines a wide array of different health communication campaigns, social justice and social change campaigns, and counter-radicalization campaigns. Readers learn about the theoretical foundations of public communication campaigns, the roles of persuasion and provocation, how people’s attitudes can be changed through fear appeals, the use of ethnographic research in designing campaigns, the ethical principles of public communication campaigns, the potential negative effects of public messaging, and much more. Describes each of the 10 steps of public communication campaigns, from defining the topic and setting objectives to developing optimal message content and updating the campaign with timely and relevant information Covers public communication campaigns from the United States as well as 25 other countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, India, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, and the United Kingdom Offers a template for creating or adapting messages for advertising, public relations, health, safety, entertainment, social justice, animal rights, and many other scenarios Incorporates key theories such as the Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) theory, social judgment theory (SJT), the Health Belief Model (HBM), social cognitive theory (SCT), and self–determination theory (SDT) Includes in-depth case studies of communication campaigns of Islamophobia, antisemitism, white supremacism, and violent extremism. Fundamentals of Public Communication Campaigns is the perfect textbook for undergraduate students across the social sciences and the humanities, and a valuable resource for general readers with interest in the subject.

Communicating COVID-19 analyses the changes of everyday communication in the COVID-19 crisis. Exploring how misinformation has spread online throughout the pandemic, the impact of changes on society and the way we communicate, and the effect this has had on the spread of misinformation.

This book provides an engaging, jargon-free introduction to the threat of global pandemics, offering an overview of the many origins and triggers of pandemic events. It covers the impacts generated by novel infectious disease outbreaks across various dimensions – from social and ethical to medical and political, from media to economic and legal implications. The author discusses the preparedness strategies developed globally, the lessons learned from various outbreaks and the mitigation measures deployed — from quarantine and social distancing to data sharing and surveillance systems — including their unintended impacts. While the risk of global pandemics is certainly intensely debated by the scientific community, and increasingly by policy makers at various levels, the threat is hardly discussed in the public domain. It only permeates the media during crisis events, such as during the SARS outbreak in 2003, the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014–15, and most notably the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic crisis. This book is thus highly timely and topical. It has a global scope, whilst at times zooming in on the implications of pandemic risk and mitigation for the Global North or the Global South. Given the interdisciplinarity of the topic, this book will be of great interest to a wider non-academic audience, as well as students from a range of subjects including politics, sociology, geography, anthropology, and international development, along with entry-level medical students keen to widen their appreciation of the social dimensions of the medical work they set out to conduct.