Introduction: Towards a sociology of pandemics

Abstract

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 risk and uncertainty such as rational, in-between and non-rational approaches to risk in everyday life, the Othering of social groups, the multidimensionality of risk and inequality, the debate about methodological cosmopolitanism, the discursive construction of legitimacy, the significance of (dis)trust for public engagement with risk, shortcomings in risk communication, and framing of fake news and conspiracy theories. The monograph concludes with reflections on perspectives for social learning, the importance of the society–nature–technology nexus for the understanding of the crisis, and finally, with envisioning possible pathways towards a new normal.

Disruption, Slowness, and Collective Effervescence: Children’s Perspectives on COVID-19 Lockdowns

“…Zinn ( 2021 ) describes these kinds of attitudes and the public support for lockdown measures as ‘herd humanism’ (p. 445), which he contrasts with the policy strategy of herd immunity, that translate rational calculative methods for risk management into everyday risk practices. Trust is a critical component for this process of translation, which combines a cognitive (knowledge) and affective (relationship) dimension (Barbalet, 2009 ; Zinn, 2021 ), and we see this emerge in children’s discussions of the public health orders and what was required of them — based on trusting governments to manage the spread of the disease, and for Harriet trust in the scientific community to develop a vaccine for the disease.…”

Pandemic patriotism: Official speeches in the face of the global COVID-19 crisis

“…Common problems for which state actions have been deployed are disinformation and uncertainty (Zinn, 2021). Lack of data, dissent among experts, multiple types of expertise required simultaneously, and different levels of institutional trust are just some examples of the conditions under which fiscal responses have been designed (Capano et al, 2020), leading to varied interpretations and reactions by authorities (Crayne and Medeiros, 2021) and the dissemination of different types of risk and conspiracy information in the media (Rooke, 2021).…”

social landscape after the pandemic crisis in Southern European societies

“…In this context, considerable intellectual and scientific effort is needed to understand, reflect on, and theorise the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on contemporary societies. The need for more social theory, and in particular a broad range of theories that can shed light on the variability, dynamics, and entanglements of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, has been widely acknowledged in the relevant literature (Matthewman & Huppatz, 2020;Zinn, 2021a;Lupton, 2022). Important theoretical discussions that address the microand macro-sociological aspects of COVID-19 include: the political economy perspective, technological progress and digitalisation, biopolitics, risk society and cultures, social interactions, institutional strength, gender issues and the need for a more-than-human approach.…”