Chapter 5
Formulations of risk and responsibility in COVID-19 contact tracing telephone
interactions in Flanders, Belgium
Government responses to the Covid-19 health crisis are composed
of recursively applied stages of risk calculation and management as necessary
processes in the containment of outbreaks. One of the most prominent forms of risk
management in Flanders was contact tracing. It occurs in three variants: (i)
the development and implementation of a smartphone-based contact tracing app, (ii)
regionally-organised contact tracing telephone conversations conducted through
commercially-contracted call centres, and (iii) home visiting by local field agents
of populations who are difficult to reach. This chapter focuses on (ii), due to its
prevalence, and is based on an interactional analysis of a corpus of 220 contact
tracing conversations with index patients that was compiled late 2020 and early
2021. The chapter opens with a discussion of the notions of “Risk Society” and
“responsibilisation” as relevant socio-cultural orientations in the current era of
globalized Late Modernity and “governmentality” as a discursive field. The
regionally-organised contact tracing telephone call can be characterized as a
large-scale, micro-level form of interactionally and dialogically-accomplished risk
management. The genre foregrounds the articulation of multiple dimensions of risk
and responsibility, situated at various levels of social organization and appeal.
The management of risk and responsibility intersects with the accomplishment of the
specific communicative functions of the genre. The contact tracer’s three-fold task
is to (i) gather private information about the index patient’s symptoms and their
contacts during a relevant time period; (ii) provide instructions about quarantine.
In addition, (iii) contact tracers are expected to sustain a caring and empathetic
stance during their interactions with index patients. In this respect, the contact
tracers’ responsibilities include their role as a representative of the government’s
risk-managing response to successive stages of the pandemic. The analysis
illustrates how various formulations of risk and responsibility interrelate with the
communicative goals and the specific interactional demands of contact tracing
telephone conversations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Responsibility in a world at risk
- 3.COVID-19 contact tracing in Belgium
- 4.Data, methodology and research questions
- 5.Risk and responsibility in contact tracing telephone interactions
- 5.1Communicative functions
- 5.2Variation in contact tracing practice
- 6.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
-
Transcription conventions
-
Appendix
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Slembrouck, Stef, Mieke Vandenbroucke, Romeo De Timmerman, Anne-Sophie Bafort & Sofie Van de Geuchte
2023.
Transformative practice and its interactional challenges in COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in Flanders.
Frontiers in Psychology 14
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