‘We’re not seen as strangers; we’re seen as part of the people’

Abstract

While many discourse analysts have explored the frame semantics of risk and health communication during outbreak response from media or doctor–patient perspectives, the discourse patterns of members of health organisations remain largely unexplored. This article is specifically concerned with risk construction processes during pandemics through the added value of understanding the communication patterns of African health experts, who have been found to be insufficiently included in outbreak response. I examine how members of an African health consortium express evaluative stance on outbreak response mechanisms, with a particular focus on the West African Ebola epidemic (2013–2016), and on their own work. I explore how they draw on stance to construct an organisational identity in the international field of outbreak management. Conducted as part of a 12-month ethnographic study, I focus on interviews with organisational members and draw on Appraisal theory to conduct a systematic analysis of the speakers’ expressions of stance. The article’s contributions are two-fold: it expands the study of the communicative processes in the field of emerging pathogens to the context of African health consortiums, and it establishes how an underrepresented expert group negotiates access and claims space in the debate on outbreak response.