"This was never about a virus": Perceptions of Vaccination Hazards and Pandemic Risk in #Covid19NZ Tweets.

In this paper, we draw on qualitative methods from the medical humanities and quantitative approaches from corpus linguistics to assess the different mappings of pandemic risks by Twitter (X) users employing the #Covid19nz hashtag. We look specifically at their responses to government measures around vaccines between August and November 2021. Risk, we reveal, was a major discursive thread in tweets during this period, but within our tweets, it was the vaccine rather than the virus around which hazard perception and response were grouped.

Bubbles and lockdown in Aotearoa New Zealand: the language of self-isolation in #Covid19NZ tweets.

In March 2020, as cases of COVID-19 were found in Aotearoa New Zealand, the government moved to eliminate community transmission of the virus through self-isolation. During this month, as the population discussed if, when and how households would be asked to stay at home, terms such as lockdown-the state of (national) closure-and bubble-the household isolating together-became common parts of everyday conversation.In this article, we blend quantitative and qualitative research methodologies from corpus linguistics, literary studies and the medical humanities to compare the affective range of the terms lockdown and bubble as they were used in tweets containing the hashtag #Covid19NZ.