Theories and Politics of COVID-19

Puncta Special Issue, 2022

I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space

2020

Current Sociology

With SARS-CoV-2 a new coronavirus is spreading around the world that challenges governments and triggers unprecedented social responses. Worldwide people have had to manage the experience of an uncertain new threat under very different conditions. A growing body of research and theoretical approaches tries to make sense of the social responses to the pandemic. This monograph issue contributes to the research on the first wave of the pandemic from the perspective of the sociology of risk and uncertainty. This includes a number of key topics such as care workers’ experiences in the Netherlands, stigmatisation and Othering in India, the multidimensionality of social inequalities in the experience of confinement in Argentina, mourning practices in Iran, discourses of legitimacy in Sweden, distrust in government in Hong Kong, risk communication in the UK, and fake news in social media. This introduction sets these contributions in the broader context of key debates in the sociology of ri...

Newsletter on the Results of Scholarly Work in Sociology Criminology Philosophy and Political Science, 2020

The significance of examining the COVID-19 pandemic from a sociological perspective extends beyond medical issues. It primarily encompasses the social dimension, focusing on the way individuals interact, and the pandemic's influence on social, political, economic, and cultural realms. This includes the transformation of social institutions and structures, as well as the dynamics of social processes in both management and self-organization. The main subject of the article is the problem of studying the impact of a pandemic on modern society with its informational, cognitive-innovative, and hyper-realistic certainty. The author explores the phenomenon of the pandemic, its impact as a global threat and danger on micro, meso, and macro-social structures and organizations, on the main institutions of society, and on international institutions. The pandemic becomes a process of social "freezing" in the broad sense, meaning any relationships among people, but also entails social, political, economic, and cultural constraints; both public and international constraints of states and international institutions.

Acta Academica, 2021

The outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 and the various measures taken subsequently, either by individual countries or by government and nongovernment bodies with a global reach, have had a profound effect on human lives on a number of levels, be it social, economic, legal, or political. The scramble to respond to the threat posed by the rapid spread of the virus has, in many cases, led to a suspension of ordinary politics whilst at the same time throwing into sharp relief the profoundly political nature of the pandemic. In addition to the new issues that have arisen regarding detection and treatment of the COVID-19 virus, perennial political issues regarding the limits of political authority, racial and gender justice, and populism and demagoguery have thrust themselves to the forefront of mainstream political discourse. This special issue, titled simply Pandemic politics, is a collection of papers that casts a critical perspective upon the political dimensions of the current pandemic. We have invited papers covering a broad spectrum of pandemic-related topics, especially with the focus on aspects of the pandemic in relation to the Southern hemisphere. The eight papers that made it to this volume are reflective of this broad approach and fall, roughly, into three categories, namely power and mistrust, disaster capitalism, and COVID-19: crisis or opportunity.

Pandemic Challenges to the Indian Church: A Theological Response, 2024

Epidemics and pandemics transcend the realm of medical interventions when it influences the lifestyles, practices and subjectivities of population. The outbreak of the ongoing pandemic, Covid 19 is unparallel in history due to the pattern of infection, magnitude of spread and the resource intensive response that it demands. A complete disruption in social practice for a prolonged period resulted in uncertainty and chaos so that the world has moved towards a BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible) world (de Godoy & Ribas, 2021). BANI is an acronym coined by Jamais Cascio as he feels that the present situation is not just unstable, but chaotic. The BANI model is more relevant in the context of Covid-19 as it helps us to understand the interplay between medical, psychological, social and cultural systems that guides individual and group behaviour towards Covid-19. A sociologist would be interested to see how a society identify new diseases; how they respond to it and what could be the consequences. This article looks into these three aspects with the help of available literature, reports and related documents. A sociological reading of Covid 19 is very much essential to examine the layers of social, economic, psychological and political impacts that it is having at the micro, meso and macro levels. Along with a medical model on Covid-19, we require an understanding of a social mode of the pandemic which could be broadly categorised as a pandemic of livelihood, poverty and inequality; pandemic of fear, anxiety and stigma and a pandemic of social action.

American Behavioral Scientist, 2022

Political scholars express concern for the continued resilience of democracy in the face of multiple crises. In times of crisis, social movements articulate grievances and make demands of political leaders and policymakers. In contrast to the wave of prodemocracy movements following the 2008 global financial crash where protesters demanded accountability from elites, mobilization during the COVID-19 pandemic has defied expectations in several key ways. First, the expectation for protesters to mobilize primarily online in the face of the restrictions and risk associated with large gatherings has not been upheld. Instead, we have witnessed widespread "offline" mass protests. Second, despite high mortality rates and significant disparities in the effectiveness of national public health responses, we have not witnessed widespread mobilizations demanding governments do better to protect citizens from the virus. Instead, we have seen two radically different responses: At one extreme, veterans of "pro-democracy" movements have "pivoted," using their skills and experience to either make up for weak government responses to COVID-19 (Hong Kong) or to reinforce government efforts to contain it (Taiwan). At the other extreme, "antidemocratic" and predominantly far right-wing movements have mobilized against public health measures, circulating COVID negationist and conspiracy messages. Indeed, the political weaponization of disinformation has been a notable feature of pandemic mobilization. I analyze these contrasting trends, highlighting the challenges they pose for the effective handling of the pandemic, and their broader implications for democratic legitimacy and resilience. In so doing, I call attention to the ways that mobilization during the pandemic challenges scholars to revisit some of our

COVID 19 pandemic is a top priority for researcher"s community of the world. An alarm raised by world class institutions has engendered collective effort to mitigate the emergency besides raising the existential fears among nation states. And why not, expert declarations are destined to raise alarm, as societies are conditioned to take expert alarms seriously. We don"t negate the seriousness of the pandemic, rather we argue that why at least equally important emergencies confronted by world are not emergencies of the first order? why same intensity of effort has not emerged over the other important issues like global hunger, terrorism, armed conflicts and more fatal diseases like cardiovascular(being number one killer disease) and environmental deterioration threatening society existentially. We explore "sociology of knowledge" and "social construction of reality" approach to address the above questions. We adopt a synthetic approach, to integrate findings from covid 19 and tenets of social construction of reality to arrive at a sociological explanation of the pandemic. This study also raises certain research questions to be explored, hence incubates potential research efforts in social sciences in general and sociology in particular.

The Global and Social Consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic, 2022

This contribution focuses on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a phenomenon that discloses problems of freedom within liberal democratic institutions. Many different governmental COVID-19-related restrictions, while useful and helpful, have faced criticism that they unjustifiably restrict freedom. At times this criticism comes from extreme liberal (or libertarian) quarters but there have also been concerns that those from disadvantaged minority groups have been overlooked in the pandemic-related decision-making. It has been argued that having “a voice” is central in the context of liberal democracy. Following Philip Pettit (On the people’s terms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), it can be said that having an effective voice is necessary for freedom. Further supporting this, according to Axel Honneth (Freedom’s right. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2014) freedom is the key value of modern liberal institutions. According to Pettit, freedom thus requires that parties to democracy be given an equal voice that is unconditioned and efficacious. Thus, the problems with democratic participation are major wrongs precisely because they are explicit transgressions against freedom. But how to reconcile this with the justifiable and legitimate feasibility limits of decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic? Time-consuming deliberation is not possible in a “state of exception” when decisions must be made quickly. This paper defends the view that feasibility limits are real and it might well be unrealistic to expect all voices to be heard during the decision-making at a time of crisis. Nevertheless, responses to a pandemic ought to be made in a way that does not forget the multiple, varied voices constituting the public sphere. Examining the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 and responses to it helps reveal the injustices that have been entrenched into democratic institutions. It highlights the voices that are not automatically taken into account even without extreme circumstances. Thus, a pandemic functions as a tragic disclosure of the injustices of the institutional order, a disclosure that should be used to argue for institutional renewal and better representation of underrepresented groups.

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.