Why COVID 19 is a Pandemic: Seeking Answers from "Sociology of Knowledge and Social Construction" (original) (raw)
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Sociology of pandemic: Perspectives on Covid 19
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.
Conclusions: Towards a sociology of pandemics and beyond
Current Sociology
This conclusion revisits the COVID-19 pandemic from the broader perspective of a changing global world. It raises questions regarding the opportunities for global learning under conditions of global divisions and competition and includes learning from the Other, governing within a changing public sphere, and challenging national cultural practices. Moreover, it exemplifies how the society–nature–technology nexus has become crucial for understanding and reconstructing the dynamics of the coronavirus crisis such as the assemblages of geographical conditions, technological means and the governing of ignorance, the occurrence of hotspots as well as living under lockdown conditions. It finishes with some preliminary suggestions how reoccurring pandemics might contribute to long-term changes in human attitudes and behaviour towards the environment and a technologically shaped lifeworld.
Towards a sociology of emergency. Epidemics, biorisks, and the society of the Coronavirus
Digithum
Over the last decade, the social agenda has been shaped by a continuous chain of potentially forthcoming future emergencies. Imagined, projected, and expected emergencies and crises have affected political and scientific agendas and redefined the pre-planning for risks at a local, national, and global level. Whilst most of these emergencies took place largely on an imaginary stage and never materialised – at least not with significant effects on global society – the COVID-19 pandemic finally made real the imaginary that had been expected and projected for over a decade. This article claims that within the context of an emergency in the making and the consequent social, economic, political, and material crises, sociology and social analysis need to assume new responsibilities by providing answers and perspective to those social developments that are direct and indirect results of the social and material conditions of a society of emergency. In a world in which the reality of emergenc...
Introduction: Towards a sociology of pandemics
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...
Papers on Social Representations, 2020
This special issue of PSR focuses on the social representations of SARS or Covid- 19. The first study analyzes the prevalence of social representations about the Covid-19 pandemic in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, their association with perceived risk and their anchoring in sociopolitical beliefs, such as RWA and SDO. The second and third articles comment on the social communication processes around Covid-19 in Brazil and France (Apostolidis, Santos, & Kalampalikis, 2020; Justo, Bousfield, Giacomozzi, & Camargo, 2020), the fourth in Italy and a last one in South Africa (de Rosa & Mannarini, 2020; Sitto & Lubinga, 2020). Three studies (fifth, sixth and seventh) examines the structure of social representations related to Covid-19 using questionnaires, the free-association technique and inductive terms like Coronavirus (Colì, Norcia & Bruzzone, 2020; Fasanelli, Piscitelli & Galli, 2020) and the new normality (Emiliani et al., 2020), analyzed by different techniques like automatic lexical analysis (IRaMuTeQ). Finally, Denise Jodelet makes a final comment and closes this issue with a reflection on Covid-19 “a separate epidemic”. In this introduction, rather than summarizing the articles, we will develop the themes and the questions they raise. Keywords: social representations, covid-19; anchorage, propaganda, conspiracy, cognitive polyphasia
Sociology of Covid-19: New Paradigm of Research and the World Order
isara solutions , 2020
The term Corona is borrowed from Latin meaning garland worn on the head as a mark of honour or emblem of majesty. Another example of scientific term derived from social context is Greek Nano meaning uncle or dwarf. Beginning in December 2019, in the region of Wuhan, China, a new (“novel”) coronavirus began appearing in human beings. ‘Though the disease currently spreading around the globe –COVID-19- is often called coronavirus, it’s really a disease caused by one type of coronavirus: SARS-CoV-2. Calling this particular one novel coronavirus is simply a way of making it clear which coronavirus is at issue: the new one.’ (Steinmetz, 23rd March) ‘Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than infectious disease. Covid-19 shows how vulnerable we remain- and how we can avoid similar pandemics in the future.’ (Walsh, 26th March) Epidemics and pandemics can wipe out the humanity very fast.
Global Sociology in times of the Coronavirus
Global Sociology and the Coronavirus. ISA Digital Platform, 2020
Social scientists have shown that the CoVID-19 pandemic is not only a sanitary crisis. It is also a social and political crisis, and should be treated as a moment of rupture that will bring major changes into our lives, our societies and our world. While often sidelined by policy makers, social sciences’ contributions in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic have been as important as, and in many ways complementary to, hard sciences.
African Journal of Biology and Medical Research , 2020
The paper delves into the socio-political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on human existence and analyses the dynamics of human society during the hey days of the virus attack on global community. Using descriptive research, findings show that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed a great impact on the political and social aspect of human race worldwide. It has succeeded in changing policy formulation process, political meetings, public relations, educational institutions, human relations and community life among others. The paper concludes that, if the COVID-19 is not aggressively fought and conditions adhered to, the unfavorable changes that have occurred due to the pandemic have come to stay and may continue to affect humanity in the long run. The paper recommends alternative research strategies on how to deal with the virus and how to eliminate it permanently for better human society, political development and social interactions among other things.