COVID-19 and Social Change in Spain

COVID-19 and Social Change in Spain
Author: Carlos de Castro
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2022-11-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 100078200X

Originating in the popular Sociología en Cuarantena blog, this volume provides a detailed and multifaceted analysis of the social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. This book originates in the great upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic when the unprecedented announcement of global lockdowns paralysed the world and put social relations on hold. In response, a loose collective of sociologists, historians and philosophers from various Spanish universities began to share their reflections on the pandemic on the Sociología en Cuarantena blog. This book takes some of those thoughts and delves deeper into the recurring themes as they relate to the Spanish experience of the pandemic. The chapters in the first part of the book address the social and political context of the various measures put in place by the government to deal with the health, economic and social effects of the pandemic. Subsequently, several chapters examine how the pandemic led to important reflections on uncertainty and authority in processes of scientific knowledge production. Other chapters analyse the effects of the pandemic on demographics, the organisation of care, the education system, the organisation of work and the recognition of essential workers, immigration policies and the digitalisation of society. Collectively, the contributions call into question the narrative of exceptionalism that views the pandemic as a singular event that is uniquely responsible for the present situation of uncertainty and instability. They also draw attention to the fragility of social prestige and trust in neglected and weakened public institutions, as well as identifying a growing socio-political polarisation that may be highly significant in the future. This collection will appeal to students and researchers with an interest in contemporary Spain and the socio-political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pale Rider

Pale Rider
Author: Laura Spinney
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2017-09-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610397681

In 1918, the Italian-Americans of New York, the Yupik of Alaska, and the Persians of Mashed had almost nothing in common except for a virus -- one that triggered the worst pandemic of modern times and had a decisive effect on twentieth-century history. The Spanish flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time. It infected a third of the people on Earth -- from the poorest immigrants of New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi, and Woodrow Wilson. But despite a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I. In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney traces the overlooked pandemic to reveal how the virus travelled across the globe, exposing mankind's vulnerability and putting our ingenuity to the test. As socially significant as both world wars, the Spanish flu dramatically disrupted -- and often permanently altered -- global politics, race relations and family structures, while spurring innovation in medicine, religion and the arts. It was partly responsible, Spinney argues, for pushing India to independence, South Africa to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war. It also created the true "lost generation." Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology and economics, Pale Rider masterfully recounts the little-known catastrophe that forever changed humanity.

Global Trends 2040

Global Trends 2040
Author: National Intelligence Council
Publisher: Cosimo Reports
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2021-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781646794973

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Communication and Social Change

Communication and Social Change
Author: Thomas Tufte
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2017-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509517812

How do the communication practices of governments, NGOs and social movements enhance opportunities for citizen-led change? In this incisive book, Thomas Tufte makes a call for a fundamental rethinking of what it takes to enable citizens’ voices, participation and power in processes of social change. Drawing on examples ranging from the Indignados movement in Spain to media activists in Brazil, from rural community workers in Malawi to UNICEF’s global outreach programmes, he presents cutting-edge debates about the role of media and communication in enhancing social change. He offers both new and contested ideas of approaching social change from below, and highlights the need for institutions – governments and civil society organizations alike – to be in sync with their constituencies. Communication and Social Change provides essential insights to students and scholars of media and communications, as well as anyone concerned with the practices and processes that lead to citizenship, democracy and social justice.

The COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 Crisis
Author: Deborah Lupton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2021-04-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1000375919

Since its emergence in early 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the world. Well beyond its health effects, the pandemic has wrought major changes in people’s everyday lives as they confront restrictions imposed by physical distancing and consequences such as loss of work, working or learning from home and reduced contact with family and friends. This edited collection covers a diverse range of experiences, practices and representations across international contexts and cultures (UK, Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). Together, these contributions offer a rich account of COVID society. They provide snapshots of what life was like for people in a variety of situations and locations living through the first months of the novel coronavirus crisis, including discussion not only of health-related experiences but also the impact on family, work, social life and leisure activities. The socio-material dimensions of quotidian practices are highlighted: death rituals, dating apps, online musical performances, fitness and exercise practices, the role of windows, healthcare work, parenting children learning at home, moving in public space as a blind person and many more diverse topics are explored. In doing so, the authors surface the feelings of strangeness and challenges to norms of practice that were part of many people’s experiences, highlighting the profound affective responses that accompanied the disruption to usual cultural forms of sociality and ritual in the wake of the COVID outbreak and restrictions on movement. The authors show how social relationships and social institutions were suspended, re-invented or transformed while social differences were brought to the fore. At the macro level, the book includes localised and comparative analyses of political, health system and policy responses to the pandemic, and highlights the differences in representations and experiences of very different social groups, including people with disabilities, LGBTQI people, Dutch Muslim parents, healthcare workers in France and Australia, young adults living in northern Italy, performing artists and their audiences, exercisers in Australia and New Zealand, the Latin cultures of Spain and Italy, Asian-Americans and older people in Australia. This volume will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural and media studies, medical humanities, anthropology, political science and cultural geography.

Primary and Secondary Education During Covid-19

Primary and Secondary Education During Covid-19
Author: Fernando M. Reimers
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3030815005

This open access edited volume is a comparative effort to discern the short-term educational impact of the covid-19 pandemic on students, teachers and systems in Brazil, Chile, Finland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the first academic comparative studies of the educational impact of the pandemic, the book explains how the interruption of in person instruction and the variable efficacy of alternative forms of education caused learning loss and disengagement with learning, especially for disadvantaged students. Other direct and indirect impacts of the pandemic diminished the ability of families to support children and youth in their education. For students, as well as for teachers and school staff, these included the economic shocks experienced by families, in some cases leading to food insecurity and in many more causing stress and anxiety and impacting mental health. Opportunity to learn was also diminished by the shocks and trauma experienced by those with a close relative infected by the virus, and by the constrains on learning resulting from students having to learn at home, where the demands of schoolwork had to be negotiated with other family necessities, often sharing limited space. Furthermore, the prolonged stress caused by the uncertainty over the resolution of the pandemic and resulting from the knowledge that anyone could be infected and potentially lose their lives, created a traumatic context for many that undermined the necessary focus and dedication to schoolwork. These individual effects were reinforced by community effects, particularly for students and teachers living in communities where the multifaceted negative impacts resulting from the pandemic were pervasive. This is an open access book.

The Unequal Pandemic

The Unequal Pandemic
Author: Bambra, Clare
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1447361237

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC- ND This accessible, yet authoritative book shows how the pandemic is a syndemic of disease and inequality. It argues that these inequalities are a political choice and we need to learn quickly to prevent growing inequality and to reduce health inequalities in the future.

Coronavirus Politics

Coronavirus Politics
Author: Scott L Greer
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2021-04-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0472902466

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

Going Viral

Going Viral
Author: Guillermo Beylis
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781464814488

Following the so-called "Golden Decade" (2003-2013) of rapid development and strong improvements in social indicators, economic growth has stalled in Latin America and the Caribbean region (LAC). Today, the external environment no longer provides tailwinds to foster an economic rebound. Foreign direct investment has moderated, trade has slowed amid elevated tensions, financing conditions are tightening, and commodity prices are expected to remain flat in the short and medium term. The region therefore needs to find internal sources of growth and focus on a productivity-enhancing reform agenda. The report analyzes the structural transformation process in LAC and evaluates if the "premature de-industrialization" patterns observed in the data are a result of distortive policies or if they represent an efficient (i.e. growth maximizing) reallocation of resources responding to the underlying drivers of structural transformation. An important message of the report is that policy makers should not focus on sectoral size but rather on productivity growth. The emergence of new technologies--under the banner of the "4th Industrial Revolution"--suggests that opportunities for further industrialization or re-industrialization are likely to be limited in many developing countries. Looking forward, the region needs to develop a productivity agenda with a special focus on the services sector. Already the largest employer in the region with over 60 percent of the workforce, the services sector is expected to grow even further and play an increasingly crucial role as an input provider to the larger economy. In short, there is a need for a comprehensive set of service-sector oriented policies. The report concludes that three major economic forces are changing the nature of work and the demand for skills. First, the structural transformation process, in general, and the de-industrialization pattern observed for the economies in the region, in particular, imply that future job growth will occur mainly in the services sector. Second, the shift in economic structure is being accompanied by a transformation of the occupational structure within broad economic sectors. The importance of service occupations--those that produce intangible value added such as marketers, managers, designers--is increasing in all sectors of the economy. Third, as machines replace humans in carrying out simpler, more routine tasks, workers will have to adapt and perform a different set of tasks in the workplace. What may become more important as new automation technologies are adopted in LAC countries, is adult learning and re-training.

Mutual Aid

Mutual Aid
Author: Dean Spade
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2020-10-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1839762128

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.