This paper investigates E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stopsµ (1909) in connection with the symptomatic ways this visionary dystopian tale is being re-read in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Forster depicts a futuristic world-state where each citizen is confined to an underground cell and is only allowed to (tele)communicate through an advanced-technology network, with a deified Machine operating like a centralised computer system and service provider. Moreover, people are required to comply with drastic measures of social distancing in a seemingly prolonged state of health emergency. Such a portrayal of an eerily possible world cannot but raise crucial issues within our ‘new normalcy’ scenario.

The high number of casualties among ethnic minority medics and nurses in the UK as a result of the Covid-19 virus has highlighted the vulnerability of minority ethnic healthcare workers in the country and raised public awareness of their largely ignored presence within key British institutions “that so often define Britishness, not least the NHSµ (Hirsch 2020). This article examines the figure of the female healthcare worker in a selection of writings by black and Asian British women writers, and argues that literary works pose a challenge to the enduring invisibility of minority healthcare workers in the social fabric of the UK. Writing at the intersection of race, gender and class, writers such as Maeve Clarke, Bernardine Evaristo, Jackie Kay, Winsome Pinnock and Meera Syal have endevoured to fill the gaps of history and reclaim the vital social role black and Asian female nurses and hospital staff have played in both imperial and post-imperial Britain, in the face of social exclusion and constant confrontations with “everyday racismµ (Essed 1991:3)

This article analyses the representation of the British National Health Service (NHS) in Government communication and news media in Britain as a crucial discursive figure of British national identity both during the months preceding the Brexit referendum of June 2016 and in the early months of the diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. We focus on a number of issues regarding the ways in which the NHS has been portrayed in the public arena. Both during the Brexit campaign and at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the NHS was adopted as a powerful unifying national symbol to be protected, thanks to a populist language based on the adoption of quasi-religious tropes and mythical themes, war metaphors, and praise for heroism. This populist language was charged with rhetorical messages and slogans which turned the NHS into an image of Britishness, as emerges especially from an analysis of the leading front-page articles from the right-wing newspaper Daily Mail in the early phases of the pandemic.

No longer solely tools in the prevention and mitigation of the spread of diseases, since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic face masks have become politically and ideologically charged symbols in the American context that have been deployed to articulate discourses of exclusion and to position people and groups as ‘the other’. The present paper adopts a critical discourse analytical perspective to examine the discursive strategies employed in popular user-generated memes and tweets that advance pro-and anti-mask stances and were shared in the first months of the pandemic in the United States. Findings reveal a tendency for pro-mask content to enact positive self- and negative other-presentation via nomination, predicational, and (de)legitimisation strategies based mainly on moral evaluation, while anti-mask memes seek legitimisation via emotive effects, the invocation of the topos of threat, and casting doubt on the intentions of institutions.

This paper enquires into the ELF-mediated online communication modes developed by a group of Nigerian migrants living in Southern Italy during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic emergency. The paper illustrates how such modes, though propositionally conveyed as written language, actually retain the analogical immediacy of spoken discourse through which migrants express their anguish at feeling caught in a situation of distress and even more marginalisation. Case-study data demonstrate that the migrants’ linguaculturally-marked use of syllabic notations, acronyms, emojis, and phrasal verbs triggers processes of semantic relexicalisation and morphological decategorialisation that undermine in many ways what so far has been regarded as the universal trends in language evolution governed and bound by natural principles of economy

The novel coronavirus pandemic has impacted our world to an extent which is still difficult to assess. Scientific information is crucial, but researchers are still struggling to characterise this new pathogen and its related disease. Consequently, a great deal of uncertainty pervades any account of and response to the pandemic. However, despite being perceived as potentially detrimental to the authority of scientists, uncertainty is essential to the development of contemporary science and technology. Adopting a qualitative approach inspired by principles from Critical Discourse Analysis, this preliminary study focuses on linguistic representations of uncertainty in the public communication of two debated Covid-19-related topics – namely, the use of hydroxychloroquine-based treatments and the tests to find a coronavirus vaccine – by analysing a selection of news articles from four major UK and US sources. The analysis is discussed in relation to Western conceptions of science and uncertainty, arguing for a more culturally inclusive understanding of science and scientific uncertainty.

The English Language fifth-year Lab at Primary Education Science in Roma Tre (academic year 2019-2020, second semester) aimed to foster trainee teachers’ language competences while providing them with methodological skills and examples of active engagement in intercultural projects using e-learning/distance learning. The Covid-19 lockdown deeply affected the course development: it forced participants to restructure their learning and activities so as to meet their new needs of self e-teaching in an e-didactics modality, as well as the fears that the new scenario was triggering; it also enabled them to discover unforeseen perspectives of international cooperation and emotional empathy with their peers at home and abroad, which fostered their will to use English as a lingua franca and improved their linguistic skills. Task-based activities regarding the different Lab modules, which ranged from self-/peer-directed assessment questionnaires to story writing and video recordings of different games, singing and creativity sessions, made the Lab become a sort of hub for innovative strategies and practices in language teaching, including the use of Makaton and music to tell stories and describe illustrations. These outputs, which have been collected and are currently under research, were meant as an assessment for the students, but also as motivating challenges to tackle the future teachers’ competences in intercultural international activities (and use English) themselves. Strategies for L2 teaching and learning have proven effective also in conveying a sense of extended community, belonging and participation in achieving shared goals to foster responsible citizenship.

This essay attempts to chart the ways that the current political, cultural, linguistic and environmental climate appears to be characterised by what one might call a complex and open set of viral transcultural subparticles, always on the verge of recurrent outbreak. While these may seem novel to us, others among us may swear that they have seen some of them somewhere before. In this context, what does it mean to once again begin defining, if not overtly translating and interpreting, the signs and symbols of what can only be defined as a form of resurgent or incipient fascism? Where have these signs been sighted or reported before, and how might each of us arrive at a workable meaning and concrete academic response to them?

Excerpts of COUP: Anthology-Manifesto, a radical response to the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff, appeared in English for the first time in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation in June 2020. During the editorial process for the English translation, the Covid-19 pandemic hit the United States, revealing in stark relief the reality of income inequality and white supremacy rampant in the country, and late capitalism’s inability – and unwillingness – to properly address it. COUP, in the original Portuguese, was born out of 2016 Brazil’s political reality, and its English counterpart was similarly informed by the conditions that led to its translation. Purportedly antifascist academics must identify and deconstruct fascism in their work and themselves by applying both antifascist theory and practice to their approach. By drawing from the research of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Umberto Eco, Freula Fernández, Maria Tymoczko, and Annarita Taronna, supplemented by a personal interview with Brazilian author Ana Rüsche, and incorporating an analysis of contemporary Brazilian and United States politics in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the present work seeks to examine the immediacy of this deconstruction and how it manifests in the translation and editing process.