The Semiotics of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Semiotics of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Author: Sebastián Moreno Barreneche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2024-11-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1350359580

Focusing on the discursive dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic from a semiotic perspective, this book uses semiotic theory and methods to analyse the meaning-making mechanisms and dynamics that occurred during, and revolved around, the pandemic. Demonstrating the utility of semiotic theory, concepts and analytical methods to make sense of discursive phenomena like those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the book explores in detail: · the blame-attribution discourses that emerged at the beginning of the pandemic; · how the coronavirus was brought to life in plastic and visual manifestations as a monster that poses a threat to humans; · how the collective actor 'the healthcare workers' was constructed in discourse and axiologised in positive terms; · the semiotics of the body during the pandemic, with a focus on the face, facemasks, social distancing and the uses of the body in online environments; · the idea of a 'new' normality following the pandemic. The book examines different dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic, including examples from Europe, Latin America and the United States and a wide range of images, texts, practices and objects, in order to highlight the importance of its discursive and semiotic nature.

Pandemics, Politics, and Society

Pandemics, Politics, and Society
Author: Gerard Delanty
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3110713357

This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of global pandemics in general and Covid-19 in particular. It brings together the reflections of leading social and political scientists who are interested in the implications and significance of the current crisis for politics and society. The chapters provide both analysis of the social and political dimensions of the Coronavirus pandemic and historical contextualization as well as perspectives beyond the crisis. The volume seeks to focus on Covid-19 not simply as the terrain of epidemiology or public health, but as raising fundamental questions about the nature of social, economic and political processes. The problems of contemporary societies have become intensified as a result of the pandemic. Understanding the pandemic is as much a sociological question as it is a biological one, since viral infections are transmitted through social interaction. In many ways, the pandemic poses fundamental existential as well as political questions about social life as well as exposing many of the inequalities in contemporary societies. As the chapters in this volume show, epidemiological issues and sociological problems are elucidated in many ways around the themes of power, politics, security, suffering, equality and justice. This is a cutting edge and accessible volume on the Covid-19 pandemic with chapters on topics such as the nature and limits of expertise, democratization, emergency government, digitalization, social justice, globalization, capitalist crisis, and the ecological crisis. Contents Notes on Contributors Preface Gerard Delanty 1. Introduction: The Pandemic in Historical and Global Context Part 1 Politics, Experts and the State Claus Offe 2. Corona Pandemic Policy: Exploratory Notes on its ‘Epistemic Regime’ Stephen Turner 3. The Naked State: What the Breakdown of Normality Reveals Jan Zielonka 4. Who Should be in Charge of Pandemics? Scientists or Politicians? Jonathan White 5. Emergency Europe after Covid-19 Daniel Innerarity 6. Political Decision-Making in a Pandemic Part 2 Globalization, History and the Future Helga Nowotny 7. In AI We Trust: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes us Deeper into Digitalization Eva Horn 8. Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and COVID-19 Bryan S. Turner 9. The Political Theology of Covid-19: a Comparative History of Human Responses to Catastrophes Daniel Chernilo 10. Another Globalisation: Covid-19 and the Cosmopolitan Imagination Frédéric Vandenberghe & Jean-Francois Véran 11. The Pandemic as a Global Total Social Fact Part 3 The Social and Alternatives Sylvia Walby 12. Social Theory and COVID: Including Social Democracy Donatella della Porta 13. Progressive Social Movements, Democracy and the Pandemic Sonja Avlijaš 14. Security for Whom? Inequality and Human Dignity in Times of the Pandemic Albena Azmanova 15. Battlegrounds of Justice: The Pandemic and What Really Grieves the 99% Index

Computational Intelligence for Managing Pandemics

Computational Intelligence for Managing Pandemics
Author: Aditya Khamparia
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2021-09-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 311071227X

This book uncovers the stakes and possibilities of handling pandemic diseases with the help of Computational Intelligence, using cases and applications from the current Covid-19 pandemic. The book chapters will focus on the application of CI and its related fields in managing different aspects of Covid-19, including modelling of the disease spread, data-driven prediction, identification of disease hotspots, and medical decision support.

Viroid Life

Viroid Life
Author: Keith Ansell Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2012-10-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 113473462X

Nietzsche's vision of the 'overman' continues to haunt the postmodern imagination. His call that 'man is something that must be overcome' can no longer be seen as simple rhetoric. Our experiences of the hybrid realities of artificial life have made the 'transhuman' a figure that looks over us all. Inspired by this vision, Keith Ansell Pearson sets out to examine if evolution is 'out of control' and machines are taking over. In a series of six fascinating perspectives, he links Nietzsche's thought with the issues at stake in contemporary conceptions of evolution from the biological to the technological. Viroid Life; Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition considers the hybrid, 'inhuman' character of our future with the aid of Nietzsche's philosophy. Keith Ansell Pearson contrasts Nietzsche and Darwin before introducing the more recent figures such as Giles Deleuze and Guy Debord to sketch a new thinking of technics and machines and stress the ambiguous character of our 'machine enslavement'.

COVID Semiotics

COVID Semiotics
Author: Mark Allen Peterson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2024-11-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 104011377X

This book examines how people around the world have articulated and shaped their experiences of COVID-19 through a sociolinguistic phenomenon known as magical thinking. Using case studies from throughout the world–China, Egypt, Europe, Jordan, Thailand, East Jerusalem, the UK, and the US–this volume looks at how people managed ambiguity and uncertainty, risk, and social isolation by viewing their experiences of the pandemic as other than, or alongside, those presented by voices and images representing scientifically derived knowledge. Each chapter in the volume introduces the reader to a core semiotic concept and shows how it can be used to analyze and unpack a specific signifying practice. In the conclusion, the several concepts from the chapters–ideological positioning, entextualization and recontextualization, double-voicing, discursive grafting, imaging, and contagion–are revisited and synthesized, in order to demonstrate that semiotics is useful not only in ethnographic studies of various “others” and of various "crises," but also in explaining the quotidian experiences of everyday life. Ultimately, this book reveals that COVID-related magical thinking practices are often as “contagious” as the virus they reimagine, spreading through social media and resulting in such social phenomena as viral videos promoting and rejecting public health practices, the first-lockdown stockpiling of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, resistance to public health recommendations, anti-vax rhetoric, and competing interpretations of emerging public health data. This book not only represents cutting-edge research in the field, but it also provides students of anthropology, linguistics, media, and communication with the vocabulary and conceptual framework to understand the human experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gatherings in Biosemiotics

Gatherings in Biosemiotics
Author: Silver Rattasepp
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Biology
ISBN: 9789949320486

Includes five short papers on the importance of semiotics for biology, a history of the conference since it began in 2001, and the abstracts for the submissions to the 2012 meeting.

Visual Culture

Visual Culture
Author: Richard Howells
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2019-03-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1509518819

This is a book about how to read visual images: from fine art to photography, film, television and new media. It explores how meaning is communicated by the wide variety of texts that inhabit our increasingly visual world. But, rather than simply providing set meanings to individual images, Visual Culture teaches readers how to interpret visual texts with their own eyes. While the first part of the book takes readers through differing theoretical approaches to visual analysis, the second part shifts to a medium-based analysis, connected by an underlying theme about the complex relationship between visual culture and reality. Howells and Negreiros draw together seemingly diverse methodologies, while ultimately arguing for a polysemic approach to visual analysis. The third edition of this popular book contains over fifty illustrations, for the first time in colour. Included in the revised text is a new section on images of power, fear and seduction, a new segment on video games, as well as fresh material on taste and judgement. This timely edition also offers a glossary and suggestions for further reading. Written in a clear, lively and engaging style, Visual Culture continues to be an ideal introduction for students taking courses in visual culture and communications in a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, sociology, and art and design.

The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture

The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture
Author: Bradley E. Wiggins
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2019-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0429960492

Shared, posted, tweeted, commented upon, and discussed online as well as off-line, internet memes represent a new genre of online communication, and an understanding of their production, dissemination, and implications in the real world enables an improved ability to navigate digital culture. This book explores cases of cultural, economic, and political critique levied by the purposeful production and consumption of internet memes. Often images, animated GIFs, or videos are remixed in such a way to incorporate intertextual references, quite frequently to popular culture, alongside a joke or critique of some aspect of the human experience. Ideology, semiotics, and intertextuality coalesce in the book’s argument that internet memes represent a new form of meaning-making, and the rapidity by which they are produced and spread underscores their importance.

Time for Revolution

Time for Revolution
Author: Antonio Negri
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2013-06-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1780936095

Antonio Negri wrote the two essays that comprise Time for Revolution while serving a prison sentence for alleged involvement with radical left-wing groups. Although the essays were written two decades apart, their concerns are the same: is there a place for resistance in a society utterly subsumed by capitalism? In the wake of the global crisis of capitalism heralded by the 2008 crash, the question has never been more relevant and Negri remains an insightful and passionate guide to any attempt to answer it.

Handbook of Research on Advanced Research Methodologies for a Digital Society

Handbook of Research on Advanced Research Methodologies for a Digital Society
Author: Punziano, Gabriella
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 919
Release: 2021-09-03
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1799884740

Doing research is an ever-changing challenge for social scientists. This challenge is harder than ever today as current societies are changing quickly and in many, sometimes conflicting, directions. Social phenomena, personal interactions, and formal and informal relationships are becoming more borderless and disconnected from the anchors of the offline “reality.” These dynamics are heavily marking our time and are suggesting evolutionary challenges in the ways we know, interpret, and analyze the world. Internet and computer-mediated communication (CMC) is being incorporated into every aspect of daily life, and social life has been deeply penetrated by the internet. This is due to recent technological developments that increase the scope and range of online social spaces and the forms and time of participation such as Web 2.0, which widened the opportunities for user-generated content, the emergence of an “internet of things,” and of ubiquitous mobile devices that make it possible to always be connected. This implies an adjustment to epistemological and methodological stances for conducting social research and an adaption of traditional social research methods to the specificities of online interactions in the digital society. The Handbook of Research on Advanced Research Methodologies for a Digital Society covers the different strands of methods most affected by the change in a digital society and develops a broader theoretical reflection on the future of social research in its challenge to always be fitting, suitable, adaptable, and pertinent to the society to be studied. The chapters are geared towards unlocking the future frontiers and potential for social research in the digital society. They include theoretical, epistemological, and ontological reflections about the digital research methods as well as innovative methods and tools to collect, analyze, and interpret data. This book is ideal for social scientists, practitioners, librarians, researchers, academicians, and students interested in social research methodology and its developments in the digital scenario.