Tag: covid
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…
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Metaphors, covid and communication
There is a great event happening this evening (12 March 2025) at UCL about “Communicating in a Crisis: Lessons Learned Five Years After Covid” with wonderful speakers. As I won’t be able to be there or to participate remotely, I thought I’d quickly highlight a few things about covid and metaphors, a topic that has…
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Bird flu – then and now
Current news about a world-wide bird flu outbreak brought back memories of 2005, dubbed then “The year of bird flu”. In an article I co-authored that year with Christopher Halliday, we noted that “[l]ately, fear of disease has been fuelled yet again by the emergence of a new highly pathogenic virus strain of avian influenza…
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Making Science Public 2022: End of year round-up of blog posts
This is now the 10th time that I have written an overview of the blog posts I have published over the preceding year. Phew! How time flies. Strangely, this year has been quite productive. I have posted more stuff about Covid, of course, but also about monkey pox, as well as about climate change, gene…
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Immunity debt: Creating and contesting metaphors
This week I am writing a post about my probably last Covid metaphor: immunity debt. What do people mean by that, I wondered? While trying to find out, I became aware of how slippery a concept this is; so I apologise in advance for misunderstandings. In 2021 a French group of researchers published a paper…
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Science, communication, politics and power
I haven’t written about science communication for a while. It’s a thorny subject. But a few days ago, Ken Rice posted some musings on science communication which made me think. He argues that when ‘we’ (I suppose he means individuals or nations or indeed policy makers) don’t “deal with various societal problems as well as…
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Covid metaphors: Three chapters and a special issue
When the pandemic began and I listened in to the chatter on the news, I started to think about the metaphors people used to talk about this devastating global event. I wrote quite a few blog posts on language, communication and metaphors. I also began various more academic activities which led to a special issue…
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Covid metaphors: Around the world in eight articles
When the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020, Martin Döring (Institute of Geography, University of Hamburg) and I (Institute for Science and Society, University of Nottingham) began to assemble and then edit articles dealing with its metaphorical framing around the world (not the whole world, of course!). Covid-19 killed millions of people and caused huge distress…
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Omicron: From Frankenstein to Hurricane
When threatened by anything from AIDs to zoonoses, we unconsciously use war metaphors and natural force metaphors (storms, tsunamis, fires, avalanches, volcanoes etc.). We can also use more consciously created metaphors, such as Frankenstein (created in the 1990s). Such old and new metaphors help us understand and mitigate old and new risks and threats. War…
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Superimmunity
From the start of the pandemic in the distant spring of 2020 linguists and communication researchers have kept an eye on language. They observed the emergence of new words, such as ‘covid’ and ‘covidiots’ and the increase in use and understanding of older or jargon words, such as pandemic, coronavirus, lockdown, social distancing, bubbles, and…
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