‘Citizenship under Covid-19: a social psychological analysis of UK political discourse during the 2020 pandemic’

 

The paper presents an analysis of the UK government discourse on citizenship during the first eight months of the Covid-19 pandemic (March-November 2020). I start by outlining a socio-cultural approach to citizenship as a practice of ‘citizen-making’ and argue that disruptive events, such as Covid-19, can unravel the ideological status quo that anchors the dominant model of neoliberal citizenship. Drawing on earlier work and adopting a Median approach (Andreouli, Kaposi & Stenner, 2019), I suggest that such disruptive events create a space of emergence, understood as a “stage betwixt and between the old system and the new”, which urges us to examine processes of change in themselves, rather than patterns through which change becomes integrated and familiarized as ‘the way things are’. The paper asks, how is citizenship ‘unravelled’ in the context of Covid-19 and what kinds of emergent citizenship(s) are taking shape? In our analysis of over one hundred briefings and other material by the Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet, we identified five principal constructions of the ‘good citizen’: the confined, the heroic, the sacrificial, the unfree, and the responsible citizen. We show that, through the rhetorical use of notions of gratefulness for citizens’ sacrifice and shared responsibility (with notable nationalistic undertones), the UK government’s discourse appears to challenge the dominant model of the neoliberal citizen. However, it solidifies this very same model by individualising and responsibilisizing citizens whilst abdicating itself from collective responsibility.

 

Eleni Andreouli is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the School of Psychology & Counselling at the Open University, UK. She is a social and political psychologist, with a particular interest in national identities and citizenship. Her work integrates discursive and sociocultural psychological approaches with citizenship studies in order to develop a transdisciplinary understanding of citizenship with a focus on everyday practice. Her research has examined constructions of the European Union and how citizens make sense of Brexit as an emerging cultural object. More recently, she has researched how citizenship is re-articulated in the context of Covid-19.

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