False Narratives and Covid-19 Beliefs

What this project will aim to investigate is to what extent the dissemination of false narratives, conspiracy theories and media propaganda have negatively influenced public perceptions of science and “experts” leading to actions of protest and/or public disobedience related to these pandemic measures.  To do this we will take a corpus linguistics approach and create a small scale corpora of texts to analyse and investigate the prevalence of these ideas and look for connections with current literature on these topics.   

This will appeal to students interested in politics, media, rhetoric and discourse analysis and will focus heavily on critical thinking skills.