Constructing the coming plague: a discourse analysis of the British Columbia Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Plan
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study explores how pandemic flu is constructed as a threat to public health in the British Columbia Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Plan such that planning for it makes common sense. Despite a history of critical research on constructions of disease, social sciences literature on pandemics is primarily practical. This study takes a critical approach using discourse analysis, which focuses on how meaning is created and shared through language use. The analysis shows how rhetorical and linguistic strategies--including active language and statistics; limited adjectives, adverbs and metaphors; recalling the past as a key to the future; reference to expert knowledge; and conferring moral responsibility onto the public to feel at risk--construct a pandemic flu as inevitable, significant and manageable. It seems to follow that such a potentially catastrophic outbreak demands considerable attention and resources. The construction makes commonsense because it is based on a familiar narrative: risk avoidance and pursuit of optimal health are fundamental responsibilities of citizens, who are enabled in these efforts by expert knowledge and the progressive discoveries of medical science. However, discourse analysis challenges common sense, revealing potential implications of social constructions. In this case, implications stem from two tensions in the plan's discourse. First, a theme of partnership and empowerment is evident, but it conflicts with a co-existing theme of authority and control. Second, although the public is addressed as an audience of the plan and exhorted to be active participants, ultimately our role is to wash our hands, receive timely information from experts, and generally "be involved." The implication is lack of clarity on who is responsible for what when difficult decisions need to be made and actions need to be taken around a pandemic. Ultimately, the analysis reveals that language need not be dramatic to wield power. It also demonstrates that disease, despite its "biomedical reality," is socially constructed, often such that the interest and values at play are obscured. The British Columbia Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Plan is not just an attempt to protect the public from an outbreak, but a reiteration of a worldview that should be challenged from time to time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".