Abstract/Summary

This special issue aims to explore questions of how knowledge is dynamically produced through discourse and the role that “knowledge-in-action” plays in developing and maintaining identities and group allegiances (Moje 2011) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. A wide range of practices in which epistemological conflicts and incongruities were implicated are addressed, including mask wearing, naming practices, the representation of scientific knowledge to lay-people, intercultural (mis)communication, nationalism, and online practices of argumentation. The papers focus not just on the relationship between knowledge and ways of representing it (Fairclough 2000; Lemke 1995), but on how ways of knowing unfold in and drive interactions between institutions, communities and individuals, opening up and closing off routes to identification and belonging. All of these papers come from a consortium of discourse analysts from the UK and Hong Kong who worked together on issues related to COVID-19 during the pandemic (see https://viraldiscourse.com).