Please join us on Thursday, February 11, at 4:10 p.m. at this URL:
https://willametteuniversity.zoom.us/j/99097527632
for our third Faculty Colloquium of the semester.
Title: Community Rhetorics of COVID-19
Presenter: Vincent Pham, Associate Professor, Department of Civic Communication and Media
Abstract: The COVID-19 global pandemic has intermeshed itself in our daily lives, (re)shaping our relations with each other and with our institutions. Yet, in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a search for the origins of the disease is often conducted in order to understand the disease, from where it came, and how the first transmission to humans might have occurred. News coverage, political discourse, and science talk sought to manage uncertainty and allocate blame. While there have been other scapegoats for the origination of a given disease historically and globally, Asians and Asian Americans have become one of the most recognizable objects of blame and derision in United States rhetoric. In this talk, I examine public discourse in news coverage that construct Asians and Asian Americans as “diseased” themselves and its replication of longstanding tropes about Asians and Asian Americans. I conclude with some future avenues of research related to COVID-19 and its impact on Asian American communities, particularly health workers.
Bill Kelm and Kathryn Nyman
Faculty Colloquium Coordinators