COVID Semiotics - Magical Thinking and the Management of Meaning

This book examines how people around the world have articulated and shaped their experiences of COVID-19 through a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as magical thinking. Using case studies from throughout the world-China, Egypt, Europe, Jordan, Thailand, East Jerusalem, the UK, and the US-this volume looks at how people managed ambiguity and uncertainty, risk, and social isolation by viewing their experiences of the pandemic as other than, or alongside, those presented by voices and images representing scientifically derived knowledge. Each chapter in the volume introduces the reader to a core semiotic concept and shows how it can be used to analyze and unpack a specific signifying practice. In the conclusion, the several concepts from the chapters-ideological positioning, entextualization and recontextualization, double-voicing, discursive grafting, imaging, and contagion-are revisited and synthesized, in order to demonstrate that semiotics is useful not only in ethnographic studies