Editorial: COVID-19 and interculturality

By the time this issue is published, it will be approaching five years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus and its subsequent global spread. It is hard to think of a country whose population was not infected by the virus, inevitably leading to the mortality of a significant number of citizens alongside the accompanying anguish for each family impacted. Thus, it is difficult to think of any other feature of the virus apart from the suffering and death which, perhaps in a harbinger of more self-inflicted horrors to come in our third decade, is what we remember as its legacy for humanity. For in contrast to the more optimistic discourse popularised by the genre of the disaster movie (e.g. Petersen, 1995), the 2019 pandemic only served to heighten the tension and alienation between countries and cultures. In fact so much around this virus remains contested that, in a journal which seeks to promote interculturality, we even hesitate to state the place where the virus originated as brute fact. It also proved impossible to arrive at any sort of international consensus either on the policies of controlling the virus, with some countries adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ approach, not least prohibiting any form of inward travel, and some countries adopting a more laisser-faire approach progressively controlled by a vaccination policy.

Popular, and populist, views of the policies exercised towards the virus and speculation as to its origin, sometimes led to extreme forms of discrimination being exercised towards foreigners and minority communities. Widely reported in the academic sphere were the negative attitudes and behaviours of majority populations towards members of the Asian student population within Europe (Jones, Jaworska & Hua, 2024; Hua et al., 2022). As with any other emergency, the hunt for a scapegoat sometimes becomes more important than the crisis itself and sadly, there were many reports of Asians being the targets of racist attacks around the world and blamed for the spread of the virus (e.g., Gover et al., 2020). As lock-down policies became enforced worldwide, the resultant transfer of educational activities at every level, from primary to postgraduate, led to a panoply of research into the educational effectiveness of remote learning and the intercultural experience of students from different cultures who were communicating daily online (see, for example, Kulich et al., 2021). Less formally reported was the immense pressure which this put upon educationalists working at every level to rapidly construct systems which would support online learning, convert their resources for a full year’s teaching and learning to a digestible online format, and change their style of delivery to one which was effective in this context. This resulted in a drain on both financial and human resources, which we are still feeling to the current day – as exemplified by a palpable lessening of the enthusiasm of academic colleagues for engagement with our journal, particularly with regard to reviewing papers. It is as if, after the forty years of under-resourcing and neoliberal onslaught which has taken place in many parts of the world, the virus finally drained the well of good will in the academic community dry.

It is against this backdrop that we have been able to pull together a collection of papers which we have assembled for this thematised open issue around the ways in which language and discourse were used in different manifestations of intercultural communication during COVID-19. Possibly as a result of the distance at which they are working after the event, since our current authors pull their studies together four years or so after the unfolding of events, the papers which have organically clustered around this issue address none of the issues above, perhaps displaying a change of gear from the events which unfolded from 2019 to 2023. Rather than focusing upon the well-worn issues of discrimination and miscommunication, authors writing at this distance have mostly written accounts which explore the dissemination and representation of information concerning the virus relating to different countries around the world: regarding the UK and Italy (Riggs, 2024); regarding Italy (Ciribuco and Federici, 2024); regarding Hong Kong (Gu, 2024); regarding Korea and the US (Koh and de Fina, 2024); and regarding a virtual exchange project originating in Argentina, Poland, and Sweden (Glimäng and Magadán, 2024).

As mentioned in our introduction, the onset of a global pandemic provided fertile material for the mutual othering of nation states, and by implication their citizens, both in the political and in the public sphere. One of the ways in which this was carried out bears further testimony to the prevailing epistemology of this journal that national identity is produced, transmitted and reproduced through language and discourse – in all its forms - rather than through the upholding of socially shared dispositions, values and beliefs as is still argued by many researchers in our field. While the political realm is beyond the brief of this issue, our first paper draws on some of the most recent advances in the techniques of critical discourse analysis in order to demonstrate how the management of the onset of the virus in Italy was constructed across the political spectrum of the British press. From its very beginnings, the differential positioning of the organs of the British press – here the left-leaning broadsheet the Guardian, the right-leaning broadsheet the Telegraph, and the rather less highbrow Daily Mail – provided fertile ground for an embryonic CDA, as it coalesced into a recognisable sub-field of applied linguistics (e.g., Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1988). CDA techniques become particular relevant to our own endeavours in critical intercultural communication, where the discourse in question serves to amplify differences between nation states, and by extension their citizens. In our first paper, Ashley Riggs builds on her and her colleagues’ previous research (Filmer & Riggs, 2023) to set out an innovative methodology used to analyse how headlines, images, captions and ledes (i.e. the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article) drawn from these three titles deploy a combination of stylistic features to construct a negative impression of Italy’s management of the virus. Riggs argues that, while previous researchers have partially explored the language of news reporting on the pandemic, they do not always ‘use specific linguistic categories or systematically investigate specific linguistic choices’. By contrast, Riggs specifically considers the ways in which stylistic features such as alliteration, intensifiers and metaphor operate both within the text, in consonance (or dissonance) with visual images, to attract readers’ attention and to influence (at the very least) or create (at the most) an evaluative stance vis-à-vis Italy’s pandemic management. Riggs further refines her analysis of linguistic elements by incorporating a novel analytical approach dubbed Discourse News Values Analysis (or ‘DNVA’, Bednarek & Caple, 2014). This enables her to identify, categorise and interpret nine distinct characteristics of the verbal-visual texts in her corpus and set out the semiotic patterns that are revealed (after Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 196). Her analysis reminds us that ‘the initial verbal content of alliteration, metaphor and intensifiers, and the initial visual material, are the result of deliberate and salient choices and play an influential role in this framing, which may help to convey and naturalise ideological positions, and exacerbate fears’.

One arena of intercultural communication which features regularly in these pages is that of medical communication, either between health professionals and members of multicultural communities, or with those who have more recently arrived on foreign shores (Álvaro Aranda & Lázaro Gutiérrez, 2022; Baraldi, 2009; Baraldi & Luppi, 2015; Jernigan et al., 2023; Piacentini et al., 2019; Van De Mieroop, 2016). Much of this previous research has revealed that, more often than not, the role of the interpreter goes beyond the scope entailed by just transmitting information between the health professional and the patient in their respective languages. Rather, complex medical terminology, ideas and terminology have to be conveyed across manifold differences that might simultaneously involve language, culture and socio-economic status. Interpreters may also have to ‘carry out culturally appropriate rephrasing or negotiation within the medical encounter’. In this, language specialists become not so much interpreters, as mediators who act on behalf of the medical subject. This was no less the case for COVID-19 than any other form of medical circumstance. Thus, our second pair of authors, Andra Ciribuco and Federico Federici, open their paper with the WHO’s recommendation in public health emergencies for ‘accurate information provided early, and in languages and channels that people understand, trust and use’ (2017, p. 1). They go on to report on the ‘strategies used by intercultural mediators who worked alongside local health authorities and civil society organisations to disseminate information about COVID-19 vaccines to migrants in two territories in Italy’. Here, the mediator’s central task was to convey information about COVID-19 and how to be vaccinated from medical personnel, along with official material on COVID-19, from the Ministry of Health to members of their target population. Respondents to their survey reported that in toto they worked across 23 different languages including both lingua francas such as English, French and Arabic, and a range of different minority languages. When interviewed, mediators stressed that they did not see their task as persuading patients to become vaccinated, although at times they were called upon to distinguish between official information and ‘false’ information which was circulating about the vaccine, an aspect which could potentially give rise to ethical concerns. Challenges were reported in actually finding the ‘correct’ terminology for explaining medical phenomena in languages which had a more coalesced global currency. Given the highly infectious nature of the virus, mediators also faced the same issues as those of the academy concerning sharing the same physical space as patients during the consultation. This resulted in a number of the mediation sessions being carried out through video calls. But often the interhuman presence of face-to-face sessions appeared to be appreciated by clients, although these could also result in mediators performing additional supporting roles.

It has been widely reported that in many countries, COVID-19 gave rise to a reassertion of the power of majority communities, with a concurrent retreat into xenophobia and deglobalisation. However, in other countries which have a more long-standing and self-assured history of multiculturalism, the negativity of the virus gave rise to perhaps surprising surges of cultural productivity and multilingual energy. Despite recent tensions in its relations with the mainland, the city state of Hong Kong turned out to be just such a place. Our third study extends our well-established series of papers setting out the linguistic landscapes of cities in East Asia region, but this time explores it within the specific context of the outbreak and management of our current theme of COVID-19 (Song, 2022; Zhang, 2016; Zhang & Chan, 2017). Chonglong Gu analyses an extensive corpus of multilingual signs which were distributed around different contexts throughout Hong Kong to issue instructions relating to the COVID-19 virus. In this, he draws on the useful distinction between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ signs made by Ben-Rafael et al. (2006), where the former refers to official signs and the latter refer to non-official signs devised more locally. Most signs were bilingual English and Chinese, but many also featured combinations with the other less widely spoken languages of Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Vietnamese, Thai, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, and Nepali. In contrast to the pervasive gloom which arises from many previous accounts of the crisis communication enacted during the pandemic, Gu stresses what is at the very least neutral, and at the best, positive and creative ways in which information and instruction are transmitted to different constituencies in Hong Kong during the outbreak. However, as the author goes on to acknowledge, this linguistic system is dynamic; and as such – like many of the cosmological phenomena now wrestled with by modern physics - by the time it is reported, it is already superseded. Thus, while this case study usefully captures a rich and differentiated semiotic landscape at one, critical, moment in time, as Gu acknowledges, research into the intercultural potential of linguistic landscapes would also benefit from further longitudinal study which captures the dynamism of the multiple languages spoken by different populations as they change through time.

What has emerged so far from the ordering of the studies that we have assembled for you in this issue is that the brute circumstances of the 2019 global pandemic led to a repurposing of well-established modes of communication, as the human hosts of COVID-19 (re)order the panoply of symbol systems at their disposal to position themselves in relation to the virus, and to other human beings. Our next paper reports on a detailed analysis of a small corpus of video blogs (aka ‘vlogs’) posted by predominantly young South Korean and American ‘netizens’ who, incapacitated and often confined by the virus, film video accounts of their convalescence. According to Jungyoon Koh and Anna de Fina, many previous studies – not only of web-based communication, but also crisis management and health studies - have approached the cross-cultural comparison of virus discourse either through the easy binarism of the theoretical frameworks which we alluded to at the top of our piece: contrastive rhetoric (e.g. Kaplan, 1966), social anthropology (e.g. Hall, 1973), and social cognition (e.g. Hofstede, 1980). By contrast, our current authors bring to bear a narrative practices approach (after De Fina, 2021). Rather than drawing uncritically on a priori assumptions about the dispositions, values and beliefs of their participants, our fourth study takes into account the ways in which the complexities of their participants’ lives and the actual material circumstances through which they are living, are brought to bear on both the style and content of their mediatised discourse. Koh and de Fina finely calibrate their analysis of a small corpus of YouTube vlogs in order to reveal how subtle variations in their participants’ talk about their symptoms, their food, their homes or hospitals, and their medical equipment combine with their use of modality and meta-comments to create not only a relationship with their audience, but also highly individualised cultural identities. Inter alia, Koh and de Fina’s analysis reveals how it is necessary to take into account the panoply of factors that play their part the discursive construction of the complexities of every subject’s experience of COVID-19, not least local pandemic policies, the material environments of patients, and the multimodal storytelling practices of narrators.

If Koh and de Fina have explored the ways in which language and multimodal discourse were employed by young people to create their own discrete, nuanced cultural identities within a medical context arising from the global pandemic, our final substantive study in this issue sets out how groups of pre-service teachers who were studying in three different countries worked online collaboratively to create artefacts during a virtual exchange project. In their paper, Glimäng and Magadán combine a multiliteracies perspective (after New London Group, 1996) with a ‘dynamic and relational approach to interculturality’ and an ‘expansive’ view of learning, which extends it beyond either institutional confines or predictability of outcome (after Engeström, 2016). The one loose constraint of the project was that students from different countries were asked to create a multimodal artefact in their international groups which addressed how the consequences of COVID-19 had affected their cities and their lives. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the students’ co-created artefacts, reflective e-diaries and follow-up interviews, which set out how their pre-service teachers developed critical literacy and intercultural awareness over the duration of the project. In keeping with the theoretical framework of their paper, they divide their findings into an account of the multimodal products created by their students’ (‘doings on the screens’) and a description of their students’ pedagogical processes (‘saying behind the screens’). In terms of product, both the mode of communication and the nature of the content was arguably not that dissimilar from that created by the young people which Koh and de Fina report on above, in their individual confinement. For Glimäng and Magadán set out how the particular platform which was selected by each of their international groups permitted the foregrounding of ‘different identities related to students as global citizens, individuals, and future teachers.’ Where this virtual exchange project differs, however, is that the pedagogical and collaborative structure of the work enabled interculturality to be, not just ‘said’, but experienced dialogically through the mutual negotiation and reflection of participants.

The collection of papers in this issue has reported retrospectively on the relationship between language and interculturality which was reflected in data collected internationally across the public, medical and educational spheres at the height of the 2019 outbreak of COVID-19. Studies that emerged either during the outbreak, or more immediately afterwards, often brought to light the darker side of the bias, discrimination and exclusion that undoubtedly arose from the virus. However, as the papers in this issue unfold, we believe they manage to move towards a hint of optimism as our studies progressively report on ways in which people, operating both individually and socially through the virus, still manage to deploy language and – often multimodal - discourse to create through ‘vibrant’ cultural identities and intercultural relations not just in spite of, but even because of, the impending threat and unnatural restrictions of the virus. An area for further investigation of the interface between COVID-19 and interculturality, which we would welcome in future submissions to the journal, is the consequences the pandemic had on students’ learning, mental wellbeing and intercultural education. Communities around the world saw repeated lock-downs with extreme isolation and loneliness as a consequence, and universities converted to online learning for extended periods of time. Intercultural exchange and study-abroad programmes were suspended, and although this paved the way for creative alternatives like Internationalisation at Home, it is disconcerting that a recent survey among more than 2700 students in Hong Kong and Mainland China found that 84% showed no interest in studying abroad, citing health and safety concerns as the main reason (Mok et al., 2021). The internationalisation of university education, including student exchange and study abroad, arguably has the potential to teach intercultural communication more ‘effectively’ than any class on the subject could ever do (cf. Ladegaard, 2022), so we welcome new research which explores how intercultural education can be realised (and encouraged) in the post-COVID era.

We conclude this issue on the theme of creativity and learning, as we bring you a review of a recent collection by Jane Andrews and Maryam Almohammad, published last year by Multilingual Matters (2023). It focuses on Creating welcoming learning environments by using creative arts methods in language classrooms. As ever, we are grateful to this month’s reviewer, Yingzi Li, for keeping us up-to-date with our reading.

Valete and Salvete

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed one or two changes to the personnel of LAIC on the cover of the last issue. These happened too late for us to acknowledge them in the Editorial for Issue 2 as it went to press, and they continue into our present issue. First up, after five years of sterling work for the journal, Vivien Xiaowei Zhou has stepped down as Reviews Editor. We are extremely grateful to Vivien for her perseverance and diligence with the labyrinthine task of selecting apposite books for us to read, commissioning reviews, orchestrating the passage of books between publishers and reviewers, and ensuring reviews get to press in good shape. Taking over the curation of book reviews is Amina Kebabi, Christchurch Canterbury University. We are extremely grateful to Amina for agreeing to take on the challenges of this role.

Over recent years, the scope of LAIC has expanded considerably, and we have felt for some time that we need some extra hands on deck to oversee the work that we do. So, we are delighted that four long-standing members of IALIC, and regular contributors to these pages, have agreed to join the journal’s Editorial Board. We extend a warm welcome to Claudia Borghetti, Flavia Monceri, Giuliana Ferri and Sara Ganassin. We also bid farewell to our editorial assistant Ambili Mohanan. We thank Ambili for her game attempts to process papers from authors to referees and for orchestrating their reviews. We now warmly welcome Vaishnavi Sivakumar, who will draw on her lengthy experience working with Informa to curate submissions to LAIC from now on.