Abstract
Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s management of COVID-19 media conferences demonstrated a complex negotiation of expressions of ‘kindness’ and political ‘control’ as Ardern sought to unify the national public and implement a national emergency that closed the border and suspended civil liberties and freedom of movement. This article considers the distinctive positive leadership style of Ardern while also demonstrating the ways it is grounded in the exigencies of the political field. A critical reading of Ardern’s media conference answers reveals four nominated categories: positive assertions, management of conflict/disagreement, delineation of politician role/responsibility, and political evasion. The four categories map the terrain of agreement and disagreement and they locate the subject position of the politician on that terrain.
Highlights
Over four and a half weeks during March and April of 2020, Aotearoa New Zealand underwent an unprecedented ‘level-4’ lockdown of national life in response to the threat of the COVID-19 virus
What is noteworthy arising from scrutiny of Ardern’s discourse in the COVID-19 press conferences is the variety of dialogical and rhetorical strategies that the Prime Minister deploys in her statements and answers
The global journalistic and public fascination with the ‘positivity’, ‘friendliness’ and ‘kindness’ that is central to Ardern’s political persona can overshadow recognition and acknowledgement of the discursive flexibility she enacts with regard to discursive encounters with different political and public actors with accompanying variable contexts of consensus and conflict
Summary
Over four and a half weeks during March and April of 2020, Aotearoa New Zealand underwent an unprecedented ‘level-4’ lockdown of national life in response to the threat of the COVID-19 virus. The success of the national response to the COVID-19 virus was in no small way attributed to the political leadership of the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. We have become distanced from earlier, more radical understandings of the concept in the eighteenth century, where ‘kind-ness’ foregrounded the interpersonal basis of subjectivity, and it was conjoined with an understanding of ‘sympathy,’ which carried a social apprehension of ‘fellow feeling,’ and ideas of ‘universal benevolence’ which informed emerging republican democracy Aware of such contexts, Jacinda Ardern’s deployment of kindness can be understood as a complex and striking strategy, raising questions about gender and politics, the conventional register of political discourse, and the role of emotion in public formation
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