Politics of News and Discourse

This presentation builds on my thesis research findings to challenge the modulations within the regulatory biopolitical processes of ‘post-pandemic’ discourses within Canadian news media, proposing discursive forms of resistance to constructions of “vulnerability”. My research took a temporal approach to understand how such constructions surrounding COVID-19 risk emerged over various newspaper sampling timelines, reflecting the modulations and fluidity of discourses. Grounded in the Foucauldian tradition, this work interrogated socio-political relations and notions of “immunity” present in Canadian newspaper articles (n=352) from March 2022 to July 2024 in their discursive construction of a ‘post-pandemic’ that ‘Othered’ populations deemed as “vulnerable”. For a patient-centered analysis on these news representations, I interviewed British Columbians with Long COVID (n=10), who proposed recommendations to counter existing constructions within news media around “vulnerability” and COVID-19 outcomes. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and Butler’s “vulnerability”, I outlined the intersections of ableism, social disparities, and stigma faced by people with Long COVID and disability communities. My research identified biopolitical discursive choices that categorized groups as deserving of access to life, and others not. My combined findings from my news media analysis and patient interviews provided insights into how we may disturb the manufactured consent to ableist discourses.

This presentation builds on my thesis research findings to challenge the modulations within the regulatory biopolitical processes of ‘post-pandemic’ discourses within Canadian news media, proposing discursive forms of resistance to constructions of “vulnerability”. My research took a temporal approach to understand how such constructions surrounding COVID-19 risk emerged over various newspaper sampling timelines, reflecting the modulations and fluidity of discourses. Grounded in the Foucauldian tradition, this work interrogated socio-political relations and notions of “immunity” present in Canadian newspaper articles (n=352) from March 2022 to July 2024 in their discursive construction of a ‘post-pandemic’ that ‘Othered’ populations deemed as “vulnerable”. For a patient-centered analysis on these news representations, I interviewed British Columbians with Long COVID (n=10), who proposed recommendations to counter existing constructions within news media around “vulnerability” and COVID-19 outcomes. Drawing on Foucault’s work on biopolitics and Butler’s “vulnerability”, I outlined the intersections of ableism, social disparities, and stigma faced by people with Long COVID and disability communities. My research identified biopolitical discursive choices that categorized groups as deserving of access to life, and others not. My combined findings from my news media analysis and patient interviews provided insights into how we may disturb the manufactured consent to ableist discourses.

At the end of March 2022, the Ukrainian media outlet Graty published one of the first witness accounts of a Mariupol resident describing the process of passing through the Russian-set "filtration camps" in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine. As was later revealed by numerous journalistic and human rights investigations, in these facilities forcibly deported Ukrainian civilians were screened and questioned, with their biometric and digital data extracted; those rendered "suspicious" during the filtration process faced the possibility of physical abuse and/or extrajudicial detention. The "filtration camps" formed one node within the broader logistics of the forced transfer of Ukrainian civilians to the territory of the Russian Federation in the spring of 2022, where Ukrainian citizens were placed into "temporary accommodation centers" (TACs) across Russian territory. In this paper, I attend to the previously underdocumented experience of placement of Ukrainian citizens in TACs. By looking into the logistical and discursive organization of the Russian state-organized resettlement of forcibly deported Ukrainian citizens inside Russia, I aim to map out the way the figure of the Ukrainian refugee was constructed during this process, with their "refugeeness" used as a "moral-political tactic" (Lippert, 1999) by the Russian state in its efforts to mobilize the discourse of humanitarianism around forced deportations.

Digital journalism heightens visibility while expanding exposure to networked harassment. This paper reads online violence against Black women journalists as algorithmic modulation, where platforms continuously recalibrate visibility, affect, and attention to produce differentiated vulnerability. Drawing on Deleuze’s control societies, it argues that platform governance no longer relies on fixed discipline but on dynamic modulation that adjusts exposure and amplification in real time. Here, Black women journalists occupy “affective visibility positions,” where high professional visibility meets racialized and gendered risk. 

The paper uses a comparative frame to examine Canada and Kenya as distinct yet interconnected digital environments. In Canada, algorithmic amplification and institutional racial bias fuel sustained, often subtle harassment. In Kenya, modulation is shaped by political contestation, electoral cycles, and coordinated digital publics that produce intense harassment events. In both cases, visibility is produced by platform logics that prize engagement, conflict, and emotional intensity.

The paper also shows how resistance appears in practices that disrupt modulation: digital refusal, collective solidarity, and strategic reconfigurations of visibility. By combining Black feminist theory, platform studies, and surveillance scholarship, it advances the concept of affective visibility modulation as a way to understand how digital infrastructures govern both harm and resistance in contemporary journalism.