Cécile Rousseau and Vivek Venkatesh, along with co-authors Christian Desmarais (McGill), Melissa Roy (Ottawa U) and Minh Thi Nguyen (UdeM), have published a new article in the journal of Anthropology & Medicine that discusses how the rise of populism and echo chambers, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have fueled tensions between different groups.
Media coverage of the pandemic has created a "defiled Other" which can lead to pseudo-scientific forms of racism. The authors of the paper focus on "borderline racism," which is the use of neutral language to reinforce the idea that one race is inferior to another.
The authors analyzed 1200 social media comments from France, the United States, and India and identified four major themes in defilement discourse: food, religion, nationalism, and gender. The authors suggest that borderline racism can help explain the appearance of hygienic othering on social media. They also recommend a more culturally sensitive approach to media coverage of epidemics and pandemics.
