About the project

How do social inequalities and mistrust play out within the global vaccine uptake in the Covid-19 pandemic?

This British Academy funded project (funded 111,230£ under “COVID-19 Recovery: building future pandemic preparedness and understanding citizen engagement in the USA and UK” programme) maps and visualises the motivations and reasoning of vaccine-hesitant groups in the UK and US whilst drawing suggestions towards community cohesion between vaccine-hesitant groups and medical practitioners.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield, University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Brunel University London take an interdisciplinary approach combining media studies, political communication, cross-cultural psychology, and computer science in tracing the relationship between historical legacies, cognitive processes, social media interaction, and vaccine-hesitancy. The project adopts a ‘symmetrical’ research design, as we analyse the systemic prejudices of both medical communities and vaccine-hesitant populations.

It investigates social, cultural, and political factors underpinning vaccine-hesitancy, studies the topics and social networks of minoritised vaccine communities on Twitter and Telegram, and highlights biases and assumptions within medical communities about minority groups, which perpetuate mistrust based in historical unethical practices by dominant culture group members.

The researchers are currently conducting interviews and focus groups with racially and religiously minoritised communities that are vaccine hesitant as well as medical practitioners in the UK and US, whilst collecting and analysing visual and textual social media conversations on vaccines.