Spotlighting case studies of manipulation practices at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis in different countries and socio-political circumstances, the authors expose context-specific discourse and argumentation strategies of ''infodemics’ (misleading information and fake news), public policy mismanagement, deceptive online and offline communication tactics, and conspiracy narratives, which end up disrupting community social cohesion. In addition to targeting manipulation-driven dissent across discourse genres through corpus-based investigations, a major strength of this volume consists in debunking manipulation while foregrounding compelling acts of counter-manipulation.
The volume’s breadth of topics, depth of analytical insights and range of methodological frameworks provide unique perspectives by capturing crisis-related manipulations across a worldwide political and cultural spectrum (Austria, Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States), with a focus on the scale and extent of multifaceted repercussions. Reaching beyond the boundaries of pragmatics and discourse analysis, this book should be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners of rhetoric, argumentation, media studies, social and political sciences.