Subject to Quarantine: A Narrative Analysis of COVID-19 Reporting in the Australian News Media

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic responses saw the large-scale return of quarantine, a once-common public health technology which, in modern society, had largely been replaced by infection control regimen combining immunisation, personal hygiene, and sanitation. While anchored in biomedicine, quarantine is a profoundly relational practice with immediate infringements upon personal liberties such as freedom of movement. The socio-cultural repercussions of targeting specific parts of the population for quarantine are likely long-lasting. Drawing on Alison Bashford’s understanding of quarantine as co-constituted by and co-constituting objects, people, and places, we conducted a narrative analysis of Australian online news published between January 2020 and December 2020. Comparing the reporting on maritime, residential and hotel quarantine in over 847 articles, we explore socio-cultural continuities and shifts in narrative plots as well as emergent subjectivities. We trace how some objects (i.e. cruise ships) become reimagined as ‘harbingers of death’; how in some places of quarantine (i.e. public housing estates) the approximation of class and race to danger is reiterated; and how a nuanced subject position is brought about in the ‘returned traveller’ quarantining in hotels. What objects, places, and people are associated with disease inflects whether and how far quarantine practices are deemed morally and socially viable.