Myths, Maps, and Vernacular Perception: Enhancing Public Communication of Epidemics

Abstract (English)

Environmental health crises (EHC), often manifesting as interconnected polycrises, have surged in frequency, intensity, and geographic spread in recent decades. Public understanding of such crises plays a crucial role in taking timely and proper action to mitigate their consequences. Thus, finding innovative communication models that would address and mediate the complex nature of EHC is of utmost importance to serve the societal needs for clarity, safety and hope.
Using historical and contemporary examples of epidemics (e.g., plague, AIDS, Ebola, COVID-19), this study examines how vernacular narratives – such as mythological legends or rumors of illness spirits or evil-doers intentionally spreading the illness – conceptualize the trajectories of health crises through the concept of maps. By comparing these vernacular mental maps with spatial patterns found in modern EHC depictions in the mass media representations and reviewing existing map-based health risk communication tools (cf., Stieb et al. 2019), the author will propose an empirically and theoretically grounded framework to highlight how cognitive or mental mapping becomes a critical component of general spatial problem-solving activity.
The proposed framework emphasizes bridging the gap between scientific disease mapping and the lived, multisensory experiences of fear and safety. By theorizing the integration of dynamic, affective, and personal belief-based perspectives into public communication to avoid “health and communicative inequities” (Briggs & Briggs 2016), the study seeks to advance more effective and empathetic engagement with epidemic-related risks. This approach underscores the potential of mental mapping that is based on vernacular perception as a tool for enhancing public comprehension and agentic response to environmental health crises, but also points out its weaknesses (e.g., the tendency to consider places more important than people).