Crisis classifications in mobility: Reporting the first COVID death in Taiwan

Abstract

Crisis classifications are integral to COVID-19 press conferences. During the initial outbreak of the pandemic, public health officials classified the crisis status of the community. Depending on the status assigned, the community faced various consequences such as lockdowns and travel restrictions. This study traces Taiwanese health officials’ classification practices across temporal orders and participation frameworks. I call this successive link of discursive practices ‘crisis classifications in mobility’ to elucidate the processes of category production and dissemination. The mobility moved from uncertainty to certainty as health officials and journalists negotiated whether the first death of COVID-19 constituted a sign of community infection or community spread. Officials deployed metadiscourse to render some categories mobile and others immobile. Journalists used metadiscourse to push forward candidate categories and animate conflicting accounts given by local experts and a global superpower. Classifications in mobility capture these challenges of deconstructing and reconstructing categories in building public consensus.