Author: Jordan Carswell

Introduction As a response to the fast spread of the novel coronavirus in China, the lockdown quickly implemented in Wuhan on Jan 23 had many ripple effects. Women medical professionals and their needs were especially not heeded even when various medical relief efforts coming from all over China rushed to the epicenter. LIANG Yu (NOTE: I capitalize LIANG here to emphasize it’s her last name. I will use “Liang” later. Her Weibo handle is her Chinese name and English name combined: @粱钰 stacey), is a philanthropist who organized the project “Stand by Her” (姐妹战疫安心行动) to coordinate donation, procurement, and distribution…

The coronavirus pandemic is, as Blommaert (2020) indicates, “a textbook example of globalization processes.” Debates on globalization’s essence, its systemic inequalities and its future in a post-pandemic world abound (Fontaine, 2020; Friedman, 2020; Frum 2020). However, a dimension of globalization that has become even more glaring and should interest rhetoricians, cultural theorists and digital humanists is circulation. Besides the transnational circulation of SARS-CoV-2 resulting in efforts to restrict intra/international flow of people and goods, there is also the circulation of new discursive forms related to the pandemic (see Blommaert, 2020). Most importantly, in the face of stay-at-home protocols, life has…

Rhetoric and Communication in the Time of COVID-19: A Global Pandemic and Digital Rhetoric as Praxis Editors: Jialei Jiang and Soyeon Lee The COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic is not simply a scientific or health crisis, but a phenomenon of global significance that cuts across social, political, cultural, bioenvironmental, and ethical domains. The crisis has spurred multi-disciplinary conversations in both academic and public spheres, ranging from viral modernity (Peters, Jandrić, and McLaren, 2020) and open science (Kupferschmidt, 2020), to post-truth conditions (Fuller, 2020) and misinformation (Mian & Khan, 2020). Also worth mentioning is the urgency to protect ethnic minority populations…