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.