Zsófia Demjén is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics at University College London and specialises in illness and healthcare discourse (im/politeness, metaphor, humour, narrative, etc.). She is author of Sylvia Plath and the Language of Affective States: Written Discourse and the Experience of Depression (2015, Bloomsbury), co-author of Researching Language and Health: A Student Guide (2023, Routledge), Metaphor, Cancer and the End of Life: A corpus-based study (2018, Routledge), editor of Applying Linguistics in Illness and Healthcare Contexts (2020, Bloomsbury), and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language (2017).
Hesitancy around vaccinations online: insights from the Questioning Vaccination Discourses (Quo Vadis) project
Vaccinations are among the safest and most effective public health tools at our disposal. Yet vaccination programmes in 90% of countries globally have been affected by vaccine hesitancy – ‘a state of indecision and uncertainty that precedes a decision to become (or not become) vaccinated’ (Larson et al., 2022). In this talk, I focus on discussions of vaccinations online, specifically on Twitter/X and Mumsnet, collected as part of the recently completed Questioning Vaccination Discourses (Quo Vadis) project. I discuss the kinds of things we have learned about vaccine hesitancy from a linguistic approach to online language, touching on issues related to word usage, the influence of the pandemic, and, broadly, communicative genres. With such insights in mind, I reflect on potential issues with typical public health messaging aiming to address hesitancy and tentatively suggest possible ways forward.