'Herd Immunity': The Unconscious of the COVID-19 Pandemic (original) (raw)
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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
Experiencing the Covid-19 Outbreak Socially: On Some Recent Philosophical Contributions
Phronimon, 2020
The coronavirus outbreak is currently scrutinised by professional philosophers from different traditions and geographical areas. By focusing on several contributions from European academic philosophers, this article assesses whether such philosophical works manifest and reproduce, consciously or unconsciously, neocolonial and Eurocentric understandings of the Covid-19 pandemic. Particular attention will be given to Agamben's and Žižek's interpretations to show the role played in their analysis by reductionist and regressive constructions of the social world. I will then draw on several contributions from African and Africana philosophers (Gqola, Asante, More, West and Outlaw), to set up a theoretical space in which the social experiencing of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as the self-understanding of academic philosophers, could be positively reconceptualised. This act of resignification has its aim in promoting adequate forms of institutional analysis and professional engagement, and it points to the emancipatory task philosophy embodies in the global South.
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...
V. 13, n. 02, 2021
The circulation of the SARS-COV-2 virus has generated a whole range of economic, social, health and securitarian effects on the planetary population, the consequences of which are not only reduced to the containment of mass contagion, but have had an impact on the daily lives of humans. As a result of the biopolitical strategies implemented by different States, the biological life of human beings is currently governed by other means justified in order to maintain health or prevent death from COVID-19 disease. The essay main goal is to analyze this event through concepts proposed and developed by Michel Foucault concerning biopower and biopolitics. These concepts can criticize the power over life exercised by both States and international organizations seeking to regulate the effects of the virus and disease. Also, through the framework of biopolitics, we can show the characteristic event of the 21st century: the transition from epidemics and endemics to pandemics. What this essay is trying to show is the extreme biologization of the lives of humans who cannot delinquete from that identity, on which it operates a whole series of biopolitical strategies to control it.
In the Name of the Virus. Intellectuals and the Pandemic
Lares, 2020
PDF AVAILABLE HERE: https://lares.cfs.unipi.it/media/full-text/lares-2020-3-rossi-monti.pdf The literature on the COVID-19 pandemic is expanding daily. This essay explores a diverse range of texts written by Western intellectuals of different backgrounds during the first phase of the pandemic and discusses some of the most widespread ideas and emotions conveyed by these texts. Four major themes are addressed: 1) political and ideological uses of the virus; 2) conceptualizations of nature and of humanity’s relationship to it; 3) discussions surrounding the fear of infection and death in secular and medicalized societies; 4) the sense of estrangement expressed by many intellectuals during home confinement. In the conclusion, these views are placed in the context of the increasing popularity, in our societies, of various forms of cultural pessimism.
COVID-19, viral social theory and immunitarian perceptionsa case for postfoundational critique
Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 2022
The special issue that this paper introduces is published in 2022, two and a half years after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic swept large parts of the world, in many cases prompting political measures that meant the interruption of economic production and social life as we knew it. While the pandemic is still unfolding, and it remains uncertain whether and how societies will learn to live with COVID-19's viral threat, many countries have eased or even completely abolished pandemic restrictions, putting an end to the above moment of interruption. There is, at least for now, and at least in the Western world, a collective sense of easing, the perception that we have passed the peak of the pandemic, that the worst is over. This position of relative hindsight both creates an opportunity and poses a challenge for a collection of papers on the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the moment seems apt to reflect on and examine the pandemic in its entirety, its conditions, stages of unfolding and consequences (Wark 2020). Especially the
Politics During and After Covid-19: Science, Health and Social Protest
Bertuzzi, N., Lagalisse, E., Lello, E., Gobo, G., Sena, B (2022) Politics During and After Covid-19: Science, Health and Social Protest. Editorial to the Special Issue “Investigating Vaccine Controversies during the Covid-19 Pandemic”. Partecipazione & Conflitto, 15(3bis): 507-529., 2022
Covid-19 represented a total social fact, especially for that part of the world (the so-called Global North and in particular its wealthier component) which is less used to face dramatic crises able to affect fundamental rights and provoke health threats on a daily basis. While acknowledging its enormous impact on individual biographies, political systems and socioeconomic equilibria around the planet, however we contrast those interpretations that have tended to naturalize the pandemic event, reading it as unpredictable, unique, disconnected from the dynamics that guide the (mainstream) Western lifestyle and mode of production. On the contrary, the genesis and above all the management of Covid-19 are the result and the mirror of broader dynamics linked to modernity, colonialism, capitalism, in one word of the Capitalocene. For this reason, it is even more correct to speak of a syndemic, to underline the environmental determinants of health, and the social and economic inequalities (re)produced by Covid-19. We therefore Work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial-Share alike 3.0 Italian License
Editor's Introduction - Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology
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