TY - JOUR
AU - Mork Rostvik, Camilla
AU - Kennedy, Helen
AU - Anderson, Chris
AU - Aiello, Giorgia
PY - 2022
DA - February
TI - 'Generic visuals' of Covid-19 in the news: Invoking banal belonging through symbolic reiteration
JO - International Journal of Cultural Studies
EP - 330
VL - 25
IS - 3-4
DO - https://doi.org/10.1177/13678779211061415
AB - In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, images of the virus molecule and ‘flatten-the-curve’ line charts were inescapable. There is now a vast visual repertoire of vaccines, people wearing face masks in everyday settings, choropleth maps and both bar and line charts. These ‘generic visuals’ circulate widely in the news media and, however unremarkable, play an important role in representing the crisis in particular ways. We argue that these generic visuals promote banal nationalism, localism and cosmopolitanism in the face of the crisis, and that they do so through the symbolic reiteration of a range of visual resources across news stories. Through an analysis of three major news outlets in the UK, we examine how generic visuals of Covid-19 contribute to these banal visions and versions of belonging and, in doing so, also to foregrounding the role of the state in responding to the crisis.
PB - SAGE Publications
UR - https://hdl.handle.net/2164/19739
KW - Coronavirus (COVID-19)
ER