Constituting good health citizenship through British Columbia’s COVID-19 public updates

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has augmented discourses of individual citizen responsibility for collective health. This article explores how British Columbia, Canada’s widely praised COVID-19 communication participates in the development of neo-communitarian “active citizenship” governmentalities focused on the civic duty of voluntarily taking responsibility for the health of one’s community. We do so by investigating how public health updates from BC’s acclaimed Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry articulate this civic imperative through the rhetorical constitution of the “good covid citizen.” Our rhetorical analysis shows how this pro-social communication interpellates citizens within a discourse of behavioral, epistemic, and ethical responsibilisation. The communal ethos constituted through this public health communication significantly increases the burden of personal responsibility for health beyond norms of self-care. Making the protection of community health primarily the responsibility of individual citizens also presumes a privileged identity of empowered, active agency and implicitly excludes citizens who lack the means to successfully fulfill the expectations of good covid citizenship.

Keywords

constitutive rhetoric COVID-19 communication health citizenship health governance

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adams

de Bont

(2007) Information Rx: Prescribing good consumerism and responsible citizenship. Health Care Analysis 15: 273–290.

Althusser

(1971) Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. In: Althusser

(ed.) Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, pp.127–188.

Bambra

Riordan

Ford

, et al. (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic and health inequalities. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 74(11): 964–968.

Baum

Fisher

(2014) Why behavioural health promotion endures despite its failure to reduce health inequities. Sociology of Health & Illness 36(2): 213–225.

British Columbia Ministry of Health (n.d.) Office of the provincial health officer. Available at: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/about-bc-s-health-care-system/office-of-the-provincial-health-officer (accessed 15 February 2021).

Brown

(2019) Don’t be the ‘fifth guy’: Risk, responsibility, and the rhetoric of handwashing campaigns. Journal of Medical Humanities 40(2): 211–224.

Burke

(1966) Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Burke

(1969) A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Canadian Institute for Health Information (2020) Pandemic Experience in the Long-Term Care Sector: How Does Canada Compare With Other Countries? Ottawa, ON: CIHI.

10.

CBC (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic: A timeline of key events across British Columbia. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/covid-19-bc-timeline-1.5520943 (accessed 15 February 2021).

11.

Charland

(1987) Constitutive rhetoric: The case of the peuple québécois. Quarterly Journal of Speech 73(2): 133–150.

12.

Coast Communications and Public Affairs (2020) Why is Dr. Bonnie Henry so effective communicating in this crisis? 22 October. Available at: https://www.coastcomms.ca/blogs/updates/why-is-dr-bonnie-henry-so-effective-communicating-during-the-covid-19-pandemic (accessed 20 February 2021).

13.

CPAC (n.d) Video archive. Available at: https://www.cpac.ca/en/video-archive/ (accessed 10 January 2021).

14.

CPRS (2020) Dr. Bonnie Henry wins 2020 president’s award for outstanding public relations and communications management. Available at: https://www.cprs.ca/About/News/2020/Dr-Bonnie-Henry-wins-2020-President%E2%80%99s-Award-for-Ou (accessed 20 February 2021).

15.

Crawshaw

(2013) Public health policy and the behavioural turn: The case of social marketing. Critical Social Policy 33: 616–637.

16.

Derkatch

Spoel

(2017) Public health promotion of ‘local food’: Constituting the self-governing citizen-consumer. In Health 21(2): 154–170.

17.

Harris

Wathen

Wyatt

(2010) Working to be healthy: Empowering consumers or citizens? In: Harris

Wathen

Wyatt

(eds) Configuring Health Consumers: Health Work and the Imperative of Personal Responsibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.211–224.

18.

Holman

Lynch

Reeves

(2018) How do health behaviour interventions take account of social context? A literature trend and co-citation analysis. In Health 22(4): 389–410.

19.

Houdt

Schinkel

(2014) Crime, citizenship and community: Neoliberal communitarian images of governmentality. Sociological Review 62(1): 47–67.

20.

Houdt

Suvarierol

Schinkel

(2011) Neoliberal communitarian citizenship: Current trends towards ‘earned citizenship’ in the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. International Sociology 26(3): 408–432.

21.

Hutchison

Holdsworth

(2021) What choice? Risk and responsibilisation in cardiovascular health policy. In Health 25(3): 288–305.

22.

Kopelson

(2013) Risky appeals: Recruiting to the environmental breast cancer movement in the age of ‘Pink Fatigue’. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43(2): 107–133.

23.

Majdik

Platt

(2012) Selling certainty: Genetic complexity and moral urgency in myriad genetics’ BRAC analysis campaign. Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42(2): 120–143.

24.

Marsh

(2020) In an age of COVID villains, an unlikely hero has emerged: B.C.’s Dr. Bonnie Henry. National Post, 28 June. Available at: https://nationalpost.com/news/in-an-age-of-covidvillains-an-unlikely-hero-has-emerged-b-c-s-dr-bonnie-henry (accessed 20 February 2021).

25.

McIlvenny

Klausen

Lindegaard

(2016) New perspectives on discourse and governmentality. In: McIlvenny

Klausen

Lindegaard

(eds) Studies of Discourse and Governmentality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp.1–70.

26.

Pan

(2020) Health communication in the age of COVID: BC’s response. Canadian Health Information Management Association, 18 February. Available at: https://www.echima.ca/health-communication-in-the-age-of-covid/ (accessed 10 March 2021).

27.

Petersen

Davis

Fraser

, et al. (2010) Healthy living and citizenship: An overview. Critical Public Health 20(4): 391–400.

28.

Picard

(2020) Opinion: Bonnie Henry is a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness. The Globe and Mail, 9 March. Available at: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-bonnie-henry-is-a-calming-voice-ina-sea-of-coronavirus-madness/

29.

Porter

(2020) The top doctor who aced the coronavirus test. The New York Times, 5 June. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/world/canada/bonnie-henry-britishcolumbia-coronavirus.html (accessed 20 February 2021).

30.

Rose

(1996) The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government. Economy and Society 25(3): 327–356.

31.

Rose

(2000) Community, citizenship and ‘the third way’. American Behavioral Scientist 43(9): 1395–1411.

32.

Rosol

(2012) Community volunteering as neoliberal strategy? Green space production in Berlin. Antipode 44(1): 239–257.

33.

Rueckert

(1963) Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

34.

Saddy

(2020) Adults in the Room: Lessons in leadership from the pandemic’s first wave. BCBusiness, 17 December. Available at: https://www.bcbusiness.ca/Adults-in-the-Room-Leadership-lessons-from-the-pandemics-first-wave (accessed 10 March 2021).

35.

Segal

(2005) Patient audience: The rhetorical construction of the migraineur. In: Segal

(ed.) Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp.37–58.

36.

Sjölander-Lindqvist

Larsson

Fava

, et al. (2020) Communicating about COVID-19 in four European countries: Similarities and differences in national discourses in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. Frontiers in Communication 5: 97.

37.

Smith

(2020) Dr. Bonnie Henry has become B.C.’s great communicator. The Georgia Straight, 1 May. Available at: https://www.straight.com/covid-19-pandemic/henry-is-bcs-great-communicator (accessed 20 February 2021).

38.

Spoel

Den Hoed

(2014) Places and people: Rhetorical constructions of ‘community’ in a Canadian environmental risk assessment”. Environmental Communication 8(3): 267–285.

39.

Spoel

Harris

Henwood

(2012) The moralization of healthy living: Burke’s rhetoric of rebirth and older adults’ accounts of healthy eating. In Health 16(6): 619–635.

40.

Spoel

Harris

Henwood

(2014) Rhetorics of health citizenship: Exploring vernacular critiques of government’s role in supporting healthy living. Journal of Medical Humanities 35(2): 131–147.

41.

Tworek

Beacock

Ojo

(2020) Democratic Health Communications During COVID-19: A RAPID Response Executive Summary. Vancouver, Canada: UBC Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions.