Introduction: Kairotic archiving of a pandemic

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe has transcended the realm of the medical to affect social, cultural, economic, political, and quotidian ways of living. Various members of society, including governments, medical experts, social commentators, academics and researchers, and ordinary people, continue to communicate their thoughts on the crisis. There is therefore a need for empirical work on the language and communicative aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The present volume responds to this need. By responding to a ‘kairotic’ moment in world affairs using data from Ghana and other parts of Africa, this collection redresses the absence of communicative perspectives on COVID discussions on Africa and the near absence of the Global South (especially Africa) in discussions on world events. The volume takes a discourse-cum-linguistic oriented view of crisis communication and sheds light on issues such as the use of metaphor, the role of social media in disseminating (dis)information, and the content, channels, and strategies of crisis communication employed by politicians, social commentators, digital citizens, and medical experts. It archives an aspect of Africa’s communicative response to a global crisis and makes an interdisciplinary contribution to the fields of rhetorical studies, linguistics, semiotics, media, and cultural studies.