Relational counterpublics: Media discourses on the COVID Delta variant surge in India

This article analyzes 2135 news reports published in four languages in India and the United States about the COVID Delta variant surge in India in 2021. We theorize how the dominant and alternate or counter media discourses, in varying structural and political contexts, emerged as ‘relational counterpublics’. Influenced by scholarly decolonial conversations critical of methodological nationalism, we examine pandemic media discourses in their global, transnational, and local manifestations, and the relationality of dominant and more localized discourses to trace the contours of power manifested in them.