Category Index

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.

2020, issue 45, Cornelia Mayr: Social reality is a performed event. As individuals we are concerned with matters of self-presentation, social role expectations, and impression management, and these expectations endure largely over time. The Covid-19 pandemic has given rise to a reality with new social rules and norms.

2020, issue 45, David Inglis: Corona-Masquerade: It sounds like the name of a comic opera. But large parts of the population of the world have very recently donned, or are being compelled to wear, face masks, in response to the rapid spread of Covid-19. Masks have fast become ever more subject to various kinds of politicised dispute and controversy.

2020, issue 45, Jorge Ruiz Ruiz: Home confinement prescribed as a prophylactic measure against coronavirus exposes us to an extreme social experience. Staying isolated at home, or being exposed to an intense and continuous family coexistence, are situations that involve inconvenience and sacrifice.

2020, issue 45, Marta Fanasca: I was in the UK when the lockdown was imposed on my home country, Italy. My mother called me after the Italian PM, Giuseppe Conte, informed the nation about the restrictive measures to be adopted to overcome the Covid-19 crisis. She told me that from the very next day all the shops would be shut down, with people invited not to leave their houses unless for necessary (although limited) grocery shopping.

2020, issue 45, Lyudmila Nurse, Maggie O’Neill et al.: ‘Stay at home!’. Biographical researchers are accustomed to, and they are well equipped (methodologically) to reflect on, changing life trajectories in unprecedented circumstances. This collective essay maps our individual experiences of a lockdown. Using the methodological approach of Walking Interpretative Biographical Method (WIBM), we developed methodological guidelines on a walking and imagining exercise.

2020, issue 45, Maciej Kowalewski: Writing about possible changes ‘after the epidemic’ shows not only optimism but maybe excessive certainty. How will it end? After all, we do not have any direct observations yet (as we mostly have to rely on secondary data), and we do not see a clear ‘end point’. The favourite topics of urban sociology are collective practices and urban space. But when almost all practices in public space are limited or forbidden, these topics change radically, and all ‘interesting’ topics are suspended.

2020, issue 45, Carlos Fortuna: I have just finished writing a book that will shortly be published in Brazil and in Portugal. It is a book about cities and the various expressions of urbanness that take place there. One of the chapters of Cidades e Urbanidades [Cities and Urbanities] is dedicated to an eulogy of walking, showing how it is only the human rhythm of the urban walk that enables us to decipher the city and its material, sociohistorical and symbolic expressions. Like us, the book was blindsided by the pandemic turbulence caused by Covid-19, and it was engulfed in the ensuing widespread darkness of nightmare and fear.

2020, issue 45, Ellie Walton: I’m sitting at my mother’s kitchen table. I’ve been here all day. My mother and I sit across from each other, co-working gently (mostly). Discussion ebbs and flows. We talk about my work, we talk about the pandemic, we talk about community networks and governmental response, we talk about collectivism and mutual aid.

2020, issue 45, Shalva Weil: Femicide, or the killing of women because they are women, is also a pandemic, and yet it has never been declared as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Until recently, it was also ‘invisible’ in sociology. Femicide, like the coronavirus, occurs in every society indiscriminately and spreads at an incalculable rate.

2020, issue 45, Claudia Marà and Valeria Pulignano: History is no stranger to global disease outbreaks, and each of them not only has taught us something about how to manage their spread medically, but also has told us something about important aspects of our sociality. For example, since the 1970s HIV/AIDS has had many lessons for humanity about the deadly danger of social stigma. Whether we are following those lessons today is a different story.

2020, issue 45, Hazel Conley: After weeks of being woken by apocalyptic morning radio news of pandemic and impending mass deaths, on the morning of 30th March 2020 came the news that the British Conservative Prime Minister, from his own sick bed, announced that ‘…there really is such thing as Society’. Since Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncement of the opposite position in 1987, and the ensuing marginalisation of sociology in politics and in academies, these words should be music to the ears of sociologists.

2020, issue 45, Victor Roudometof: ‘Coronapocalypse: make sure you cite me when you use that word’, wrote Jeffrey Hass (University of Richmond, VA) on his Facebook page. Duly noted. The visual images of empty squares and deserted streets from various capitals have already served as the subject of a photo essay in The New York Times. It feels somewhat anti-climactic. Thanks to an impressive array of post-apocalyptic images there is hardly an element of surprise. Life imitating art does not cause a stir.

2020, issue 45, Mirjana Ule: Spending my days isolated at home in Ljubljana, I am in a mood to reflect on the state of the world. In these times when anxiety and panic have increased as the result of the viral pandemic, I remember the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein and his predictions of critical and chaotic social conditions in his 1998 essay on Utopistics. Or, Historical Choices Of The Twenty-First Century.

2020, issue 45, Deborah Giustini: As I type this piece, Belgium is transitioning to its second week of lockdown to counteract the increasing Covid-19 infections. Leuven, a vibrant town usually buzzing with university classes, research events, and cultural highlights, has gone silent. One just has to venture outside, in the quarantined streets, to register how everyday activities grow quieter by the day.