Abstract

MORENO-BARRENECHE, Sebastián. The Heroes of the Pandemic: The Discursive Construction of the Healthcare Workers Collective during the COVID-19 Crisis. CS [online]. 2021, n.33, pp.75-101.  Epub Feb 02, 2021. ISSN 2011-0324.  https://doi.org/10.18046/recs.i33.4057.

Besides its impact in health, economics, and politics, the COVID-19 pandemic has allowed the emergence of phenomena of discursive nature, specifically regarding the solutions societies have found to make sense of the crisis caused by the uncontrolled spread of the virus. From a socio-semiotic approach, this article analyzes the collective identity construction process of the healthcare workers during the pandemic. After generally introducing semiotics as the discipline interested in meaning-making and signification, this paper studies four semiotic mechanisms that can be identified in the processes of discursive construction of collective identities. The aim is to explore how those have been developed during the pandemic in the specific case of healthcare workers. As it is shown, the case renders visible the semiotic mechanisms of segmentation, actorialization, generalization, and axiologization.

Keywords : Coronavirus; COVID-19; Healthcare Workers; Semiotics; Constructivism.

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