Europa, Covid-politiek en de (on)verwachte golf van nationalistische verhalen (EUROSICK)

In the face of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, the unity of the European Union, at least at the beginning of the crisis, started to
crumble. The initial policies and the later vaccine-related management of the pandemic showed the role nationalism plays in the
context of public health responses to emergencies, including evacuations and quarantines, travel and socio-cultural constraints. While
many scholars have started to document the impact of these measures on citizens, human rights, migrants, and so on, almost no attention
has been paid 1) to examine and to compare configurations of different European national identities that were generated in the course of the
management of the pandemic, and 2) to a sociohistorical perspective to investigate the possible links between those nationalistic and warrelated
discourse and the exclusionary and inefficient policies and practices that surge in Europe and beyond. Eurosick will innovatively
conjoin the sociology of migration and nationalism with research on historical disasters to fill this gap. It will do so, benefitting from
my expertise in the analysis of discourse-practice nexus, and through an examination of media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic
and the related policy documents in three European countries (Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland); and in three points in time: before the
outbreak in Europe, at the time of the outbreak, and at the beginning of 2021 following the implementation of the COVID-19 vaccination
programmes. The analysis will be carried out using critical discourse analysis, an interdisciplinary approach used to study oral and textual
discourses, which views language as a social practice. These learned lessons will impact the capacity of Europe to tackle the future crises
in a more collective and efficient way.