COVID-19 and shame : political emotions and public health in the UK / Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in 2020, interventions by the UK government maximised rather than minimized experiences of shame. From healthcare workers insulted in the streets to the online shaming of ‘Covidiots' and the ‘Lepers of Leiceister', public animus about the pandemic found scapegoats for its frustrations. Rather than intervene with robust strategies to sensitize people about the effects of this behaviour, however, the government's healthcare policies and rhetoric seemed to exacerbate experiences of shame, relying on a language that intensified oppositional, antagonistic thinking, while dissimulating about its own responsibilities. In this book, we consider how shame came to shape and structure the UK's response to COVID-19, through the format of six thematic chapters. Across our six case studies - on pandemic language and the use of the neologism ‘Covidiot'; on the online shaming of healthcare professionals; on racism, shame, and health inequalities; on shaming public health interventions over obesity; on a rhetoric of ‘common sense' which made unnecessary space for shame; and on ‘Operation Moonshot', the mass testing programme deployed as a means of saving face - we explore how shame has been explicitly and tacitly produced and encouraged. We conclude that there is an urgent need for public health interventions that are ‘shame sensitive,' addressing the experience of shame as a crucial, if often overlooked, consequence of such interventions..

Medienart:

E-Book

Erscheinungsjahr:

2023

Erschienen:

London New York: Bloomsbury Academic ; 2023

Reihe:

Critical interventions in the medical and health humanities

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Cooper, Fred [VerfasserIn]
Dolezal, Luna [VerfasserIn]
Rose, Arthur, 1981- [VerfasserIn]

Links:

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov [teilw. kostenfrei]

ISBN:

978-1-350-28342-8

978-1-350-28343-5

Themen:

COVID-19
Communicable Disease Control
Health Communication
Politics
Shame
Social Stigma
United Kingdom

Anmerkungen:

Includes bibliographical references and index. - Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed September 29, 2023)

Umfang:

1 online resource (1 PDF file (xii, 148 pages))

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

186938539X