Risk Metaphors in Canadian COVID-19 Public Health Communication

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.