COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Prejudice in Digital Communication

Massimiliano Demata (University of Turin) and Natalia Knoblock (Saginaw Valley State University) are inviting additional proposals for a thematic issue of the Journal of Language and Discrimination. The issue is devoted to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on anti-Asian prejudice and its representation in digital discourses.

As reported, racism and anti-Chinese sentiments increased significantly after the start of the pandemic and have been directly linked to it (Vachuska, 2020). Disturbingly, over ¾ of Chinese Americans polled about their experiences reported being victim of at least one incident of COVID19-related racial discrimination online and/or in person, and over half reported experiencing health-related Sinophobia (Cheah et al., 2020; Lee, 2020). Verbal and physical attacks on Asian Americans have been linked to racism and xenophobia deeply entrenched in the US society, and to the “us vs. them” worldview relegating Asian Americans to the bottom of the social hierarchy (Gover, Harper & Langton, 2020). Such feelings have been at least partly caused or exacerbated by the inflammatory rhetoric of US politicians (Wu, 2020), and there has been evidence of former president Trump’s tweets causing an uptick in anti-Asian verbal aggression on Twitter (Ziems et al., 2020). Researchers have analyzed the victims’ narratives (Satoh & Kaori 2021) and even identified counter-discourses employing linguistic creativity to oppose hate (Zhu, 2020).

The JLD thematic issue aims to continue research into racially motivated anti-Asian hate speech and verbal aggression amplified during the Coronavirus pandemic. It will expand beyond the US context and explore the effects of the pandemic on the prejudice and discrimination toward the Chinese, and, broadly, toward all groups and ethnicities collectively blamed for the outbreak of the disease. We are especially interested in the links between particular news reports and/or inflammatory rhetoric of certain public figures and the increase of verbal aggression toward those blamed for the epidemic. Studies investigating expressions of hateful attitudes, communicative strategies involved in blaming and scapegoating, legitimation of hate, and racism denialism are welcome, as well as evaluation of the role of the digital medium in shaping and dissemination of hateful content. A variety of approaches and methods are appropriate, including but not limited to digital and critical discourse analysis, multimodal analysis, corpus-driven and corpus-assisted studies. Interdisciplinary studies are particularly welcome. No publication payment from the authors will be required.

Please submit an abstract of 350-400 words by April 15 to Natalia Knoblock ((nlknoblo /at/ svsu.edu)) and Massimiliano Demata ((massimiliano.demata /at/ unito.it)). In your abstract, clearly state the aims and research questions of your paper, its theoretical foundations, the data and methods used to analyze the data chosen, as well as some of your findings. Full articles will be due by July 31 and are expected to go into the March 2023 issue of JLD.

References

Cheah, C. S., Wang, C., Ren, H., Zong, X., Cho, H. S. & Xue, X. (2020). COVID-19 racism and mental health in Chinese American families. Pediatrics, 146(5). DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.1542/peds.2020-021816 Gover, A. R., Harper, S. B., & Langton, L. (2020). Anti-Asian hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the reproduction of inequality. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 45(4), 647-667. Satoh A. & Kaori, H. (2021). The Impact of COVID-19 on Communication: Immigration, Media Representation, and globalization. Panel at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference. Retrieved from https://cdn.ymaws.com/pragmatics.international/resource/collection/ 3960B891-EE4B-4DB1-A7F5-47C668E86C8D/Abstracts_book_-Winterthur IPrA2021.pdf Vachuska, K. F. (2020). Initial Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Racial Prejudice in the United States: Evidence from Google Trends. SocArXiv. DOI:10.31235/osf.io/bgpk3. Wu, N. (2020, March 18). USA Today: GOP senator says China ‘to blame’ for coronavirus spread because of ‘culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs’. USA Today. Retrieved from https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/03/18/coronavirus-sen-john-cornyn-says-chinese-eating-bats-spread-virus/2869342001/ Ziems, C., He, B., Soni, S., & Kumar, S. (2020). Racism is a virus: Anti-asian hate and counterhate in social media during the covid-19 crisis. arXiv[Preprint].arXiv: 2005.12423. Zhu, H. (2020). Countering COVID-19-related anti-Chinese racism with translanguaged swearing on social media. Multilingua, 39(5), 607-616.