Risk Metaphors in Canadian COVID-19 Public Health Communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the multi-faceted and ambiguous metaphorical connotations of “risk” terminology in COVID-19 updates delivered by Canadian public health officers (PHOs) during the first year of the pandemic. Our study reveals diverse and conflicting configurations of risk as both a manageable and unmanageable entity, a personal possession and an external location, an attribute of people and of spaces and activities, and a spectrum of degrees that (dis)identified those at lower and higher levels of risk. We argue that this situated tangle of metaphorical meanings contributed to a broader Canadian politics of neoliberal-communitarian health governance which was premised simultaneously on the active citizen’s individual responsibility to manage risk for self and others and on the vulnerabilization of citizens designated “most at risk.” For the RHM field, our study suggests new ways of exploring the meanings and implications of “risk” language within diverse contexts of health and medical communication.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".