Social Stigma of COVID-19: A Semiotic Analysis of WHO Campaign Posters

Intan Siti Nugraha

doi:10.31940/soshum.v11i2.2489

Abstract

COVID-19 has been reported to be risen in numbers of infected cases and deaths. The massive report by media and social network which focus on the spreading and infection may affect not only physical health but also individual’s and general population’s mental health, isolation and stigma. To eradicate COVID-19-related stigma and discrimination perpetuated by both individual and group of people, WHO exhibits some anti-stigma campaign posters. This study employs qualitative method to acquire deep investigation of meaning and to involve the social context. Thus, by using Roland Barthes’s semiotic approach, analyzing signifiers and signifieds, this study was aimed to unmask both denotative and connotative meanings of the stigma embed within the six health campaign posters of COVID-19 by Southeast Asia WHO. The analysis was focused not only on the verbal sign of posters (linguistic text), but also its relation to their visual sign (imagery messages). From the analysis of the two sign systems of posters, the result shows that the six posters connote acts of discriminatory behaviours, stigmatization, stereotype and blaming. Through the posters, WHO propagates people to work together to fight COVID-19 and to bring out the best humanity, to have better awareness and positive attitudes and appeals governments, citizens, media, key influencers of communities to have a role in preventing and to stop stigma surrounding in South-Asia and specifically in Indonesia which becomes the target of the poster viewers during the pandemic. Those messages are connoted through different font colors and sizes and the illustration on each poster.

Highlights

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak as a severe global threat, a pandemic on 11th of March 2020
To provide semiotic understanding through denotation and connotation meaning in five campaign posters exhibited on the WHO Official Website, this study focuses on the linguistic sign of posters and on their image sign
To meet the purpose of the study, as a semiotic study, the study was under the umbrella of Roland Barthes‟s semiotic approach (1977), his conception of the rhetoric image to uncover the messages asserted by the certain actors which are meant to influence the way individual or group sees themselves and others especially to demystify the stigma constructed among people during the outbreak of COVID-19

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the SARS-CoV-2 virus (known as COVID19) outbreak as a severe global threat, a pandemic on 11th of March 2020. In a study conducted by Reny & Barreto (2020), Trump and his allies in conservative media racialised the coronavirus as Chinese and broadly Asian, which „activates‟ anti-Asian attitudes and behaviours in public by US social groups These attitudes and behaviours do not appear only in America (AlAfnan, 2020; Lee & Waters, 2021; Reny & Barreto, 2020) and in almost all Western countries (Roberto et al, 2020; Sorokowski et al, 2020) and in Asian countries (Abdullah, 2020; Ahdab, 2020; Roy et al, 2020), within many aspects such as marginalised population (Kantamneni, 2020) and groups of people, such as health workers (Kang, Li et al, 2020; Kang, Ma et al, 2020), migrants (Devakumar et al, 2020) and travellers and people of Asia descent (Turner-Musa et al, 2020). Those misleading recognition, negative attitude and high level of fear and anxiety further may lead to other psychological consequences such as stigmatisation, discrimination (Reny & Barreto, 2020), loss and exaggerated fear (Kang, Ma et al, 2020) and blaming (AlAfnan, 2020)

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