| The 2009/2010 outbreak of H1N1 thrust pandemic influenza into the media spotlight. Not only did the outbreak dominate media coverage during that time, but news coverage also played an integral part in the official public health response for public communication across Canada. As influenza pandemics are notoriously fraught with scientific uncertainty, much of that news coverage centred on risk (e.g. infection, vaccination). Over the past several decades, risk has emerged as a central organizing principle and a prevailing characteristic of modernity, and recent studies on the discursive constitution of risk claim that risk discourses operate as a technology of governance within neoliberal societies. To date, very little work has been done to explore the discursive constitution of H1N1, or H1N1 risk, within the news media. To address this gap, I analyzed print news coverage of the H1N1 outbreak within two major English-language, Canadian daily newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. Applying a governmentality and risk perspective as an analytic lens, and informed by the theoretical concepts of biopower and biopedagogy, I explored how media discourses on risk made possible particular ways of acting, seeing, and talking about ourselves, both as individuals and in social groups. The results indicate that three distinct strands of risk discourse were operating in the media during the H1N1 pandemic: 'causal tales' which serve as explanations of risk; 'cautionary tales' which warn of expanded H1N1 risk; and, 'precautionary tales' which offer instructions for managing H1N1 risk. I argue that these results suggest a shifting discursive terrain surrounding H1N1 risk and its management, in which each new 'tale' recalibrates the conditions of possibility for H1N1, and hails the audience into a new H1N1 storyline and a heightened awareness of H1N1 risk. Further, I argue that this expansion of 'risk space' makes possible a particular kind of 'pandemic subject' which operates as a neo-liberal bio-citizen. Lastly, I posit that there is a heretofore untheorized risk rationality, operating in the context of pandemic influenza, that pertains to the case-by-case assessment of risks located within the social interactions of daily life, which I term 'social-interactive risk'. |
