Framing Crisis in Seattle During COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter: Faith in Generative Dialogue

Introduction

The deliberative sense of the word “crisis” as a process of selection and major turning point is particularly relevant to the global COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter (BLM) of 2020. In a March 1^st “Interim Guidance for COVID-19” statement addressed to public health communicators, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recommended building partnerships with community leaders and stakeholders. Among such stakeholders, the authors specifically examine the role that faith organizations play in communicating about public health and civil crises, especially as this communication coordinates activity between governments, health organizations, and activist groups. Such faith groups represent existing social networks, and many of them provide publicly available genres of communication, which explicitly processed their values throughout 2020. The interface between government, science, health, civil, and religious communications on these crises provide opportunities to examine how information is reconceptualized in meaningful ways.

From a database of several hundred public-facing texts curated over a four-month period (March-June of 2020), this study draws on frame analysis, frame alignment, and embodied cognition/metaphors from social movement studies and linguistics to document communication about the outbreak (Goffman, 1986; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003; Snow & Benford, 1988). This study also uses the concept of uptake from rhetorical genre studies to show how these frames are conditioned through genres such as online services, newsletters, organizational websites, and social media posts (Freadman, 2002; Reiff & Bawarshi, 2016). As interpretive processes, framing and uptake are particularly suited to addressing how faith communities grapple with and navigate responses that align with their own values and new government and health policies and recommendations. Specific guiding questions include: What role do faith communities play in communicating public health and civil issues? What kinds of framing are faith communities mediating? How are communication genres impacting uptake?

As Pennycook (2010) has pointed out, dynamic global and local circumstances lead to emergent language practices, so this study sketches a contextual timeline of large-scale events but focuses primarily on the area around Seattle in Washington state as a local setting within a global context. Local circumstances are inherently and rhizomatically connected to other sites and circumstances but manifest elements of those issues differently. Seattle experienced the earliest confirmed case of COVID-19 in the US, so the response and processing time in western Washington state began earlier than other areas of the country. Also, the activities in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle during the renewed, international BLM protests inspired strong emotions and drew national attention. This study brings into conversation discourses of religious groups with various scientific, government, and activist communities. COVID-19 and the BLM movements are two interrelated examples of crisis, and our analysis considers how generative dialogues could look in the future. To set the chronological context for the convergent developments of crisis, Appendix 1 summarizes major events impacting Seattle for the first six months of 2020. Dates specifically related to racial issues have been italicized.

Entrypoints/Background

Several interdisciplinary threads of conversation converge to guide this inquiry. The sections below weave together the study’s dynamic approach to crisis, some challenges in discussing matters of faith, and a brief introduction to relevant interdisciplinary traditions.