SOCIOLOGY OF PANDEMIC: A CROSS DISCIPLINARY UNDERSTANDING

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.

Between the Worlds: Narratives and Notions of Pandemics, 2022

Y. Erolova, E. Tzaneva, V. Ivanova, J. Popcheva (eds.) (2022). ‘Between the Worlds: Narratives and Notions of Pandemics’. Vol. 4. Sofia: IEFSEM & Paradigma. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic challenges, new fields of study are intertwining and emerging to explore the causes, responses, prevention, coping, and consequences of this worldwide infectious disease affecting all sectors of society at global, regional, and local scales. Analytical frameworks and solutions are inquired through interdisciplinary approaches researching past and present impacts of similar sociocultural, economic, and political phenomena. These efforts contribute to the new anthropological subfield – the Anthropology of pandemics and seek to understand how people experience and respond to pandemics in general and this particular one, but also how pandemics shape society and culture, and how they reveal social and cultural inequalities in our world. As a result of researchers’ joint efforts, people’s beliefs, values, and practices, forming their understanding of disease and their response to it, have been examined. This collection is the result of the International Conference ‘Between the Worlds: Narratives and Notions of Pandemics’ held on 7 and 8 June 2022 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The editors of the volume consider it a serious challenge to integrate and organise together so many different texts, methodological approaches, and the opinions of 24 scholars – philosophers, psychologists, historians, ethnologists, anthropologists, and economists from different schools and scientific traditions.

New Perspectives on Turkey, 2020

The pathogen that has almost completely paralyzed societies the world over had an innocuous beginning. On January 7 2020, researchers in China announced that they had identified a new coronavirus. The tone of the next day's New York Times piece reporting on this was nonchalant at best. Rather than pointing towards the potential damage that this virus could cause, it directed our attention to the threats caused by MERS and the SARS. 1 About a month later, on February 11, when the disease acquired its own name, COVID-19, it had already begun to wreak havoc in Asia, and was only a few days away from causing the first death in Europe and only about two weeks away from reaching out to Latin America and Africa. Another month later, on March 12, the World Health Organization called it a pandemic, recognizing the worldwide prevalence of the new coronavirus. As the time of the writing this commentary in late April, we are still in the thick of this pandemic. The global situation continues to be epidemiologically, economically, sociologically, and politically volatile. Despite the fact that experts in different fields and various global agencies had predicted with absolute certainty that we were going to confront epidemics and pandemics of this kind, and that these predictions were popularized by people like Bill Gates, states and societies were still caught off guard and unprepared. We ended up finding ourselves in an environment of chaos and uncertainty.

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.

Aawaran Publication/Nepal Science Foundation Trust-NSFT, 2021

So far, several fascinating and fancy stuff have been imagined by humans. Not all imaginations are bound to happen and could be experienced. However, the current pandemic (COVID-19) seems, and now is set to surpass beyond what a human brain could have imagined. A deep socio-economic scar is in the process of being created and nobody yet knows how deep this wound is going to penetrate. At this juncture, we have congregated to produce a book entitled “Dissecting the COVID-19 Pandemic”, through the facades of global socio-economic impact. It is our pleasure to try to compile what we have seen and hence present the factual accounts to the people post February 2020, and for the days to come. It is a history unfolding, an array of events in front of the human kind. Our effort in witnessing, reviewing, compiling, and binding is definitely going to be a memorabilia of the time it has witnessed. It is said that “seeing is believing”, and here, the authors have factually seen and have by now certainly believed that COVID-19 is not just a simple flu. The pandemic crises of COVID-19 has shaken the world, and its impact is multidimensional and has adversely influenced many aspects of human life. Globally, over 22 million people were infected, and over 4.5 million have died in 215 countries, when this book was in the press. The eight chapters of this book cover various facades of the coronavirus crises, plus their impact globally and particularly in Nepal. The information is relevant to many developing countries. The chapters are written by science scholars, engineers, media analysts, development experts, and scientists in allied disciplines in Australia and Nepal. The contributing authors have both knowledge and experiences of Nepal and overseas in the subject matter and have provided evidence-based information. Our publication efforts and contribution to Nepal and Nepali diaspora deserve special mention. We hope this book will generate enough interest and stimulate significant discourses among scholars, policymakers, and the community at large to advocate for an inclusive health, disaster risk reduction (DRR), diplomacy and migration policy to overcome future pandemic challenges. Finally, we acknowledge the support of NRNA-Australia, Nepal Science Foundation Trust-SK & TT Department, Nepal Academy of Science and Technology (NAST), Embassy of Nepal-Canberra, Federation of Nepalese Community Associations of Australia (FeNCAA), Australasian Nepalese Medical and Dental Association-Australia (ANMDA), and Aawaran publication for their support to bring out this book.

Bristol University Press, 2022

Introduction to the book Social Movements and Politics During Covid-19: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/social-movements-and-politics-in-a-global-pandemic

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice

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.

Policy Brief, 2021

The more we can advance in knowledge about the New Coronavirus (COVID-19), the greater are the chances of fighting it. In this sense, the achievements of science have been impressive. However, it is essential to reflect on the impacts of the current pandemic on the economic, political, and social spheres, beyond the acceleration of global power reorganization whose epicenter may no longer be restricted to the developed West. Concerning the economy, the scenario is of bankruptcies and market concentration among large companies. In the orbit of politics, polarization, and worsening of xenophobic nationalism. In the social sphere, unemployment and increasing inequalities. About global power, the growing projection of East Asia is imposed on decision-makers at the same speed with which dissent divides opinions on these themes.