The pandemic has changed the way people interact and communicate through social and mass media. This collection explores what a discourse analyst can do in response to the pandemic. It is written to an audience of beginner discourse analysts, but it will also be of interest to more seasoned scholars.

Ten chapters, including an introduction by the editor, make up the contents of this interesting collection, which is a result of the online blog ‘Viral discourse’. Using social semiotics, Jones displays how the rhetoric for masks changed from historically being seen as ‘concealers’ of identity to ‘things that protect’ (8–9) and finally to things that have ‘transformative power’ to challenge hidden ideologies (10–11). On the same topic where there is ‘clear public disagreement’ (15), Christoph A. Hafner carries out a genre analysis to exemplify how two health experts communicate their expertise on mass media. Adopting multimodality and translanguaging, Wing Yee Jenifer Ho analyses how cultural identities are constructed in relation to face masks on YouTube videos of an American teacher who lived in China before returning to the US. Teacher Mike positions mask-wearing as being ‘better prepared’ against Covid-19 and as part of ‘global citizenship’ (24).

Using a corpus approach to analyse printed media releases in the UK, the US, and Germany, Sylvia Jaworska displays that both the British and American press used war metaphors more saliently while German press had hardly any military terms, preferring ‘test’, ‘protect’, and ‘inform’ instead (29–35).

Adopting an ethnographic approach, Zhu Hua analyses 200 shop signs. Signalling the scarcity of multilingual signs, she raises the question whether the death toll is higher in the UK's ethnic communities because of lack of public information in other languages. In his chapter, Erhan Aslan illustrates how memetic humour is created via multimodal strategies employed by internet users. Carmen Lee's chapter underlines the role of language researchers in shedding light on the linguistic realizations of online aggression, using Covid-19 as a starting point. In another study gathering online data, Elisabetta Adami reports on the early findings of the PanMeMic website, which is a translational collective research experiment that employs Socratic tradition and citizen science.

Jones carries out a mediated discourse analysis on the UK Covid-Alert-System, stating that the system does not communicate with the public about what they should do, but provides a ‘scaffolding upon which the PM and his government can stage their performance’ (77).

With the search towards taking ‘meaningful action’ (3) as discourse analysts in a time of crisis, the edited collection is one of the most profound among a small set of studies conducted in this emerging field. It provides a rich analytical and critical perspective to real-life problems, raising some important questions in politics and language policies. Its focus on the link between semiotics and ideologies is crucial. Although the collection would feel more cohesive if a clear tie among chapters was offered (such as themes and data sources), contributors’ efforts to rapidly respond to the global pandemic with strategies from discourse analysis are commendable.