1ST LANGUAGE AND THE PANDEMIC CONFERENCE BOOKLET

Welcome to the 1st Language and the Pandemic conference! Our topic is a global problem, and we are pleased to welcome a global diversity of participants, with presenters from more than a dozen countries worldwide. Hedra extends a very warm, digital welcome to the academics and researchers working in linguistics, media, computing, social sciences, healthcare, and business listed here, for an interdisciplinary exploration of the ways in which language has been at the centre of how we understand, and express pandemic realities, and how we handle interaction during this unusual time. The papers in this conference explore the ways in which language and media shape how people around the world express their beliefs and interactions around health information, healthcare, and political leadership, in this time of the Covid-19 pandemic. They explore themes in medical, political, scientific, and everyday discourse. We are all looking forward to an excellent meeting of mind, sharing how we, at a global level, talk and write about the coronavirus pandemic.