Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens’ use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers.

Comedy is a powerful contemporary source of influence and information. In the still-evolving digital era, the opportunity to consume and share comedy has never been as available. And yet, despite its vast cultural imprint, comedy is a little-understood vehicle for serious public engagement in urgent social justice issues – even though humor offers frames of hope and optimism that can encourage participation in social problems. Moreover, in the midst of a merger of entertainment and news in the contemporary information ecology, and a decline in perceptions of trust in government and traditional media institutions, comedy may be a unique force for change in pressing social justice challenges. Comedians who say something serious about the world while they make us laugh are capable of mobilizing the masses, focusing a critical lens on injustices, and injecting hope and optimism into seemingly hopeless problems. By combining communication and social justice frameworks with contemporary comedy examples, authors Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman show us how comedy can help to serve as a vehicle of change. Through rich case studies, audience research, and interviews with comedians and social justice leaders and strategists, A Comedian and an Activist Walk Into a Bar: The Serious Role of Comedy in Social Justice explains how comedy – both in the entertainment marketplace and as cultural strategy – can engage audiences with issues such as global poverty, climate change, immigration, and sexual assault, and how activists work with comedy to reach and empower publics in the networked, participatory digital media age.

This book explores communication during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Featuring the work of leading communication scholars from around the world, it offers insights and analyses into how individuals, organisations, communities, and nations have grappled with understanding and responding to the pandemic that has rocked the world. The book examines the role of journalists and news media in constructing meanings about the pandemic, with chapters focusing on public interest journalism, health workers and imagined audiences in COVID-19 news. It considers public health responses in different countries, with chapters examining community-driven approaches, communication strategies of governments and political leaders, public health advocacy, and pandemic inequalities. The role of digital media and technology is also unravelled, including social media sharing of misinformation and memetic humour, crowdsourcing initiatives, the use of data in modelling, tracking and tracing, and strategies for managing uncertainties created in a pandemic.

Communicating COVID-19 analyses the changes of everyday communication in the COVID-19 crisis. Exploring how misinformation has spread online throughout the pandemic, the impact of changes on society and the way we communicate, and the effect this has had on the spread of misinformation.

"Could there be a timelier gift to quarantined readers...? I doubt it."—The Washington Post "A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support."—Kirkus Reviews "Connects writers, readers, and booksellers in a wonderfully imaginative way. It's a really good book for a really good cause"—Bestselling author James Patterson ALONE TOGETHER: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 is a collection of essays, poems, and interviews to serve as a lifeline for negotiating how to connect and thrive during this stressful time of isolation as well as a historical perspective that will remain relevant for years to come. All contributing authors and business partners are donating their share to The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc), a nonprofit organization that coordinates charitable programs to strengthen the bookselling community. The roster of diverse voices includes Faith Adiele, Kwame Alexander, Jenna Blum, Andre Dubus III, Jamie Ford, Nikki Giovanni, Pam Houston, Jean Kwok, Major Jackson, Devi S. Laskar, Caroline Leavitt, Ada Limón, Dani Shapiro, David Sheff, Garth Stein, Luis Alberto Urrea, Steve Yarbrough, and Lidia Yuknavitch. The overarching theme is how this age of isolation and uncertainty is changing us as individuals and a society. "Alone Together showcases the human desire to grieve, explore, comfort, connect, and simply sit with the world as it weathers the pandemic. Jennifer Haupt's timely and moving anthology also benefits the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, making it a project that is noble in both word and deed."—Ann Patchett, Bestselling author, bookseller, and Co-Ambassador for The Book Industry Charitable Foundation

Covid-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Responses is one of the first books uniting an international team of scholars to investigate how media address critical social, political, and health issues connected to the 2020-21 COVID-19 outbreak. The book evaluates unique civic challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for media worldwide, exploring pandemic social norms that media promote or discourage, and how media serve as instruments of social control and resistance, or of cooperation and representation. These chapters raise significant questions about the roles mainstream or citizen journalists or netizens play or ought to play, enlightening audiences successfully about scientific information on COVID-19 in a pandemic that magnifies social inequality and unequal access to health care, challenging popular beliefs about health and disease prevention and the role of government while the entire world pays close attention. This book will be of interest to students and faculty of communication studies and journalism, departments of public health, sociology, and social marketing.

“This startling, vital book deserves our attention.” —San Francisco Chronicle For fans of War Dogs and Bad Blood, an explosive look inside the rush to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, from the award-winning ProPublica reporter who saw it firsthand. The United States federal government spent over $10 billion on medical protective wear and emergency supplies, yet as COVID-19 swept the nation, life-saving equipment such as masks, gloves, and ventilators was nearly impossible to find. In this brilliant nonfiction thriller, called “revelatory” by The Washington Post, award-winning investigative reporter J. David McSwane takes us behind the scenes to reveal how traders, contractors, and healthcare companies used one of the darkest moments in American history to fill their pockets. Determined to uncover how this was possible, he spent over a year on private jets and in secret warehouses, traveling from California to Chicago to Washington, DC, to interview both the most treacherous of profiteers and the victims of their crimes. Pandemic, Inc. is the story of the fraudster who signed a multi-million-dollar contract with the government to provide lifesaving PPE, and yet never came up with a single mask. The Navy admiral at the helm of the national hunt for additional medical resources. The Department of Health whistleblower who championed masks early on and was silenced by the government and conservative media. And the politician who callously slashed federal emergency funding and gutted the federal PPE stockpile. Winner of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, McSwane connects the dots between backdoor deals and the spoils systems to provide the definitive account of how this pandemic was so catastrophically mishandled. Shocking and monumental, Pandemic, Inc. exposes a system that is both deeply rigged, and singularly American.