Framing the pandemic: from information to outformation in the COVID-19 era

Abstract

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has been the most mediatised health crisis in human history, involving a rapid circulation of knowledge in global networks and a continuous flow of spectacular images and narratives that have rendered the pandemic graspable in cultural, political, and moral terms. This article proposes that the intertwined nature of two opposite trends of knowledge production – scientific reasoning and affective storytelling – can be analytically approached through the concept of ‘outformation’ that provides explanatory power and conceptual clarity to make sense of the disorderly flows of knowledge in the pandemic-era. Using frame analysis, the article examines how one key term of the pandemic era, herd immunity, is taken from its scientific context and mobilised across different epistemic arenas from journalistic media to parliamentary debates as a vehicle for mistrust towards political and expert authorities in Finland that is a country characterised by high levels of trust towards authorities. The Finnish case is not only a national case about the framing of a specific term in times of epistemic instability but also provides a valuable lens to knowledge production during the pandemic era.