Stakeholder engagement and chaotic narrative spaces: Singapore’s COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories

Abstract

In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, Singapore grappled with an escalation of COVID-19 cases among the low-waged foreign workers living in dormitories. Singapore responded to the outbreak by implementing increasingly strict public health measures, which included a partial lockdown and movement restrictions of over 300,000 foreign workers. Our qualitative analysis of the texts created by three key stakeholders (the Singaporean government, local news media, and local non-profit organisations) at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in foreign-worker dormitories revealed the construction of contrasting, confusing, and collaborative narratives. These narratives manifested what our paper describes as ‘chaotic communication’, wherein conflicting and competing messages are crafted or used to build organisation-public or public-public relationships. We also propose ‘chaotic narrative spaces’ as a conceptual framework to illustrate how social, political, and organisational actors shape narratives about issues and influence the decisions made during a public health crisis.