Category Index

2020, issue 45, Sergey A. Kravchenko: Due to formal pragmatism, rational knowledge and disciplinary technology, the ‘society of normalisation’ arose that is based on liberal biopolitics. It might seem to be a kind of a ‘rational surveillance tool’ for health care. However, this type of surveillance is limited by nation-state sovereignty and the dominant ‘true’ knowledge about the nature of diseases and the reasons that cause them.

2020, issue 45, Peter Holley: After its initial outbreak in December 2019 in the city of Wuhan, Hubei Province, People's Republic of China, by April 2nd, 2020 the 2019 novel coronavirus (Covid-19) had spread to over 200 countries and territories across the globe. In fact, by this date there were 928,437 confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide and 46,891 deaths, although with variations in testing practices in different countries we cannot assume that such figures capture the full extent of this pandemic.

2020, issue 45, Birgit Blättel-Mink on behalf of the DGS board: In the course of March 2020, the German Sociological Association (DGS) began to document the substantial sociological presence in the media, gathering and presenting through its homepage the many shades of sociological contributions on the Corona crisis. The majority of pieces are invited op-eds and interviews in off- and online media, meaning that the media obviously believe that sociology has important things to say about the contemporary crisis.

2020, issue 45, Ilan Kelman: As Covid-19 disrupts day-to-day life around the world, could it also disrupt decade-to-decade political animosity? Might long-standing conflicts be set aside, and then continue on peaceful pathways, in order to deal with the Coronavirus disaster? This is the question asked by research into disaster diplomacy, examining how and why dealing with disasters (before, during, and after) does and does not create new, lasting diplomatic initiatives.

2020, issue 45, Signe Banke and Ian Woodward: We are researchers from an interdisciplinary team funded to study music festivals as spaces of social mixing, exchange, and encounter in multiple European settings. We prepared to collect field data in early summer 2020. Because our project was designed to address questions of sociality in (physical) public spaces, the spread of Covid-19 calls into question not only our methods and approach, it challenges us to reflect upon the project we promised to complete.

2020, issue 45, Ludger Pries: In the 21st century, social entanglements are transnational, mutual dependencies are global. The Corona crisis demonstrated this for everybody. Although climate change has been indicating this for a long time, it had not the same effect on public awareness and political action as Covid-19.

2020, issue 45, Ellen Annandale and Ana Patrícia Hilário: In this short piece, we reflect on attempts to secure health and prevent illness spread through health behaviour change within a context of entrenched and longstanding inequalities, including those of health. Our concept ‘together apart’ intends to convey both how practices of individual social distancing are being used to protect the collective, and to point to some of the ways in which pre-existing social inequalities set apart the most vulnerable, some of whom, in a two-fold injustice, are at the front-line of wider social protection.

2020, issue 45, Mariano Féliz: The world is undergoing what will probably be a trascendental change. Capitalism has been getting deeper into its civilisational crisis, and the current pandemic is just its latest development. The 2008 crisis was a premonition of the crisis of the Capitalocene. The geologic era of the domination of Capital is coming to terms with Earth.

2020, issue 45, Anna-Mari Almila: Covid-19 and fashion seem to go hand in hand – or rather, glove-in-glove – in these precarious times. The Covid-19 global situation has many sartorial fashion elements, some more obvious and reported, others more hidden and under-reported. These elements encompass both macro- and micro-levels of social life, haute couture and mass market clothing, production and consumption, raw materials and distribution networks, rich and poor people, short-term and long-term trends and consequences, and winners and losers.

2020, issue 45, Jörn Ahrens: When the Covid-19 pandemic started spreading in Germany, when people started to stay at home and to communicate in public at a distance of 1 to 2 metres from each other, when the government began to enforce formal restrictions on public behavior that came with massive limitations of civil rights, I was reminded of two things.

2020, issue 45, Bernd Bonfert et al.: Covid-19 threatens to bring an end to neoliberalism. Back in October 2019, when we drafted the call for papers for the ESA’s Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) mid-term workshop – What’s Next? Critical Political Economy at the End of Neoliberalism? – we could not have known how close to the end of neoliberalism we would now seemingly find ourselves.

2020, issue 45, Alexander Seifert: During the current worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, older adults are particularly excluded from in-person society. To begin with, adults aged 70 years and older belong to the vulnerable group and often experience critical courses of Covid-19 due to multimorbidity and pre-existing health conditions.

2020, issue 45, Ana María López Narbona: Since the beginning of the pandemic, I was interested in knowing what would happen in the case of scarce medical resources. This is not something new as, every day, medical authorities need to decide who, among the many people waiting for an organ transplant, is the best receiver of an organ.

2020, issue 45, Kathrin Komp-Leukkunen: The newspapers are full of articles on the coronavirus pandemic. Many of us start our days by reading these articles to see how the pandemic developed while we were sleeping. However, the wealth of information can be overwhelming. We learn the numbers of new infections, recoveries, and deaths from across the world.

2020, issue 45, Jaime García-Iglesias and Maurice Nagington: Since the advent of Covid-19, or coronavirus, we live – once again – in times of contagion, of updating death tolls, daily headlines, of governments spurred into action to fight an ‘all-out war’ on the Covid-19 virus, as the New York Times put it. As gay men, in times like these, we cannot avoid remembering the AIDS crisis that swept the world in the late 1980s and 1990s.