Firebreak
October 20, 2020
About a month ago, when I thought the government was about to announce a ‘circuit breaker’, I wrote a blog post about that metaphor. Now the Welsh government has announced a circuit breaker but has called it a ‘fire break’. That means that I now have to write a quick post about the ‘fire break’ …
Sleepwalking into pandemic polarisation
September 28, 2020
I was musing about emerging talk of a division between experts when it comes to dealing with Covid-19. This has been in the air for a while but came more to the fore after the publication of two open letters by two groups of experts. As an article in the British Medical Journal, entitled tellingly …
Dimmer switches and circuit breakers
September 25, 2020
Since the beginning of this pandemic I have been writing blog posts charting the metaphors used to think and talk about it. Most of these metaphors are based on well-known experiences of floods, storms, wars and journeys – or air, water, earth and fire. However, I have recently noticed some other metaphors which are a …
Metaphors and realities: Coronavirus and climate change
September 18, 2020
We have been surrounded by global disasters this year, inflicted on us by ‘invisible enemies’. These invisible enemies have been made visible in two ways. In the case of the pandemic, disaster metaphors related to floods, fire and storms have made the coronavirus visible. In case of climate change, real floods, fires, storms and droughts …
The meaning of lockdown
August 7, 2020
The other day, my father in Germany, who is quite old, phoned me and asked what lockdown meant. ‘Lockdown’ is now used in Germany instead of more native words like ‘Ausgangssperre’ (exit barrier, if you like). He especially wondered about the ‘down’ bit, as he understood the ‘lock’ bit and also had heard about ‘locking …
‘A fire raging’: Why fire metaphors work well for Covid-19
July 31, 2020
This is a post by Elena Semino, University of Lancaster. It was first published on the website of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) on 1 July, 2020. It provides a thorough and fascinating analysis of fire metaphors used during the pandemic. *** Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, metaphors have been …
Pandemic blogging: Taking stock
July 24, 2020
Over the last few months I have written a number of blog posts about the social and cultural impacts of the current pandemic of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of the various topics I have covered, from metaphors to politics. Pandemic metaphors As early as January …
Notes on color [colour] of protein spikes on COVID-19 virus
July 10, 2020
This is a quick guest note by Chris Toumey (6 July 2020) When the COVID-19 corona virus began to be depicted visually in early 2020, its protein spikes (which give it a semblance of a crown) were always colored red. This puzzled me, and I explored it by putting together several sources of information. From …
Bubbles: A short history
July 6, 2020
Last week we heard a lot about bubbles, especially school bubbles and travel bubbles. This metaphor has been bubbling up for a while during the pandemic and I became curious about how and where it emerged. Then I saw a tweet from Gareth Enticott which contained an article about New Zealand researchers who had come …
Lockdown words
June 26, 2020
I was looking at news articles about the lockdown and it suddenly dawned on me that something similar was happening here to what we observed around 2005 in terms of ‘carbon compounds’. At the time the climate crisis was extensively discussed in the news and people tried to find ways out of it. One focus …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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