It’s been several weeks since we launched our special online series of essays and photo-essays; engaging with the pandemic in the real-time of its making. Our aim has been to document the thoughts (and lived-experience) of authors and artists from diverse locations, cultural/political contexts and from different intellectual perspectives.
Below you will find a list of the articles published to date. More to come over the next few weeks.
Big picture analysis of the pandemic and global order include essays by Göran Therborn (How the Pandemic is Changing the World), Rogers Brubaker (The Paradoxes of Populism).
Abram de Swaan (Before the Catastrophe), Peter Wagner (Historical Moments and Social Transformations), Dilip Menon (Viral Histories) situate the pandemic in the historical context.
Jeffrey Alexander (Covid/Floyd), Jonny Steinberg (Sovereignty in South Africa), Warwick Anderson (Death in Bondi), Beth Vale (The Virus in the Queues), Charlie Veric (Praying in the Pandemic) offer local perspectives with a global relevance.
Sophie Chao (Techniques of the Body in COVID-19), Megan Warin and Natali Valdez (#My(white)BodyMyChoice) consider the politics and phenomenology of the body.
Sian Supski (watching the crown), Nathalie Karagiannis (Instead) and John Kinsella (Surge Ode Lament) use image and poetry to interpret the implications of the pandemic.
And finally, Ayça Çubukçu (Another End of the World is Possible) and Steve Matthewman (Disaster Communism) gleam for some hope that might emerge from crisis.
Articles
COVID-19: CODA
by Peter Beilharz and Sian Supski (Melbourne) Covid-19 has taken over the world, taken over everything including our waking everyday lives, our dreamlives, our scholarship and future institutional funding logistics. Our friend and collaborator from Jozi, Peter Vale, provoked this special project in insisting that we must respond, call out members of our global network…
Music Video: Help me
by Ian Collard (Melbourne) We invited Ian to close this project for us, using a song with a message – ‘Help Me’. This is the last post on this series, to be followed by a coda next week . Thanks, meantime, to Ian for playing us out, and thanks to all our contributors, to all…
Cuba: autocratic governance and pandemic juncture
by Johanna Cilano Pelaez (Mexico) While COVID-19 has impacted all of Latin America, Cuba has faced it from its own particular situation. The state’s ability to control the main resources of the economy and regulate social behaviour – important for the implementation of mitigating measures at a pandemic juncture – goes hand in hand with…
Covid Disaster in America and the World
by Craig Calhoun (Tempe, Arizona) The disaster in America points to hard truths about Covid that matter everywhere. Covid strikes rich countries as well as poor, powerful as well as weak. Vulnerability that does not map neatly onto old divisions of developed from underdeveloped or imperialist from post-colonial. Its impact is shaped by pre-existing social…
Eleven theses or hypotheses on the way out of the pandemic
by Michel Wieviorka (Paris) How to think about the post-pandemic? This is not a simple question. The phenomenon is global, since it concerns the whole world, but its treatment is mainly national, with considerable differences from one country to another. The pandemic is not static but moving. Paradoxically it may well be long-lasting, since we…
What Is a Crisis?
by Phumlani Pikoli (Johannesburg) Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has been in a state of panic, fearing the unprecedented times we face. The idea that the pandemic has induced some pre-pubescent existential crisis is laughable, however. As the world has been forced to sit and reckon with its own systemic failures…
Postcards from the Covid-19 pandemic
by Simon Marginson The Covid-19 pandemic is instructive for social theory. It is like a gigantic experiment. It is not a controlled experiment, but a universal condition that enables differentiation on the basis of time and space, both geographical and discursive. It is possible to compare society before and during the pandemic, and also to…
Possible Futures, Now
by Tawana Kupe (Pretoria) Drawing from both traditions, universities are trying understand how it was that science largely missed the signs of Covid’s coming, and so fulfil their obligation to secure the long-term future of humanity on this planet. But they know, too, that the university must rise to the immediate challenges of global health,…
Online workshop: “Living in Crisis”
An online workshop on “Living in Crisis” organized by the TASA Social Theory thematic group and Thesis Eleven. Speakers: Deborah Lupton, Craig Calhoun, Peter Vale and Peter Beilharz
Noticias educativas from the international Mexican newsroom
by Alonso Casanueva Baptista The secretariat of public education in Mexico – the institution in charge of the standardized schooling practices there – organized for the current semester to take place via radio, internet, but most importantly, television. From August 24th to the end of the school year (July 2021), thirty million Mexican students will…
Between the acts: at home in uncertain times
by Timothy Andrews In the current pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Virginia Woolf’s audience in Between the Acts. Forced into our homes as a result of lockdown measures, a mirror is held up to us so that we can see the intimacy of our lives under the stark light…
I can’t wait to see what it’s like on the outside now: a postcard from quarantine in downtown São Paulo
by Isabela Capovilla Romanetto and Matheus Capovilla Romanetto That it was possible to dream in more depth is immediately related to how much more silent the city became. This is not only an effect of the absence of people on the streets, but also of changes in the mobility system, which for some time had…
Two Australias
by Tim Soutphommasane and Marc Stears (Sydney) For the most part, the Australian government’s response has been effective in suppressing the numbers of infection since the virus was detected here in March 2020. There are, however, signs that we are now seeing a more worrying new phase of conservative ideological ascendency in Australia.
Crisis, trust and pandemic
by Andrew Simon Gilbert It has become increasingly common over recent years for academics to declare a “crisis of trust” in Western institutions. One of the main points of this crisis has been the healthcare system, with eroding trust in doctors and the institutions of biomedicine apparently evident in surveys, as well as the proliferation…
Photography – Empty Desire Lines: Cape Town under Lockdown
by Alex Oelofse Cape Town is a city of astonishing beauty and contradiction. It is tough, beautiful, relaxed and edgy in different proportions. The god’s eye view by drone of this austere beauty leaves us wondering, in awe, of how life goes on the ground, and when it might return to its own version of…
Creative Destruction and Covid
by Peter Newman Then we turned the corner of a new decade with raging bushfires in Australia, and the unleashing of a frightening new pandemic. Could this be the crisis that would creatively lead to a new green economy as I optimistically suggested and have written much about for most of this century?
New Wages For Students: A poster after Lotta Feminista
by Emily Floyd New Wages For Students: A poster after Lotta Feminista is a Print on Demand artwork by Emily Floyd, especially for the T11 Living and Thinking Crisis series
A Void like the Plague: Fragments of Domestic Theory
by Howard Prosser Camus is back. The Plague is everywhere. Its brave everyday characters resonate with our ideal selves, our care workers, and our belief in a possible ending to the global pandemic. But his allegory also highlights how exclusionary politics is always an option. Our city selves are vulnerable – to plague, to authority…
India’s migrant crisis: the sovereign injunction that was not
by Ira Raja In the weeks that followed the announcement of the lockdown, the Government of India, not unlike governments elsewhere, issued several rules and decrees, all purportedly aimed at containing the contagion through non-violent measures or what the Indian PM called ‘the people’s curfew’. But the biopolitical measure of the lockdown, meant to illustrate…
Only a virus can save us?
by Michael Marder The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 is an effect of definite (objective) causal chains. Nonetheless, the way it is called upon to serve as the blueprint for a transition to an ecologically sensitive life is spurious, purely accidental. Accidents may, of course, be of at least two types: random events that do not presuppose…
The Utopian Counterfactual
by Gianpaolo Baiocchi Living through the extended pandemic and its still unfolding aftermaths has been sobering for those of us who understand ourselves as critical scholars in the social sciences. Events have unleashed fast-evolving social demands, from #cancelrent to #defundthepolice that dialogue with the very same radical theory that we write and teach, and yet…
COVID-19 remapping East Asian Modernity
by Mark Harrison The political meaning of the virus is contending constantly with its biological realities. But as its transmission has slowed in Asia, it is leaving behind newly calcified traces of the long-standing enmities, political compromises and aspirations of different modernist visions set in place in the early 20th century history of modernisation in…
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