Conclusions: Towards a sociology of pandemics and beyond.

Jens O Zinn

doi:10.1177/00113921211023518

Abstract

This conclusion revisits the COVID-19 pandemic from the broader perspective of a changing global world. It raises questions regarding the opportunities for global learning under conditions of global divisions and competition and includes learning from the Other, governing within a changing public sphere, and challenging national cultural practices. Moreover, it exemplifies how the society–nature–technology nexus has become crucial for understanding and reconstructing the dynamics of the coronavirus crisis such as the assemblages of geographical conditions, technological means and the governing of ignorance, the occurrence of hotspots as well as living under lockdown conditions. It finishes with some preliminary suggestions how reoccurring pandemics might contribute to long-term changes in human attitudes and behaviour towards the environment and a technologically shaped lifeworld.

Highlights

Epidemics are reoccurring events that significantly affect societies or sometimes even threaten their existence
Considering repeating global pandemics, sociologists of health and illness have suggested developing a sociology of pandemics, comparing their similarities and differences (Dingwall et al, 2013; Matthewman and Huppatz, 2020; Strong, 1990)
The various once-in-a-lifetime crises of recent decades such as the Chernobyl disaster, the AIDS/HIV disease, the 9/11 attack, and climate change, invite us to see the pandemic in a broader framework as of how risk, uncertainty and social change are experienced, approached and envisioned at different times and places

Summary

Introduction

Epidemics are reoccurring events that significantly affect societies or sometimes even threaten their existence. Even though wearing facemasks is a common and widely accepted means in response to infectious diseases in many countries in Asia, it was seen critically in the Global North, sometimes interpreted as a cultural oddity, lacking scientific evidence for its efficiency (Fleming, 2020).

Results

Conclusion