RESUMO
Love is a theme at the centre of all our lives, including those of sociologists and social scientists. It has been widely addressed and described in literature and poetry, extensively depicted in the pictorial arts, sung about in music. Even philosophy, from its very beginnings, has devoted beautiful and intense pages to this theme. For reasons difficult to understand, the founding fathers of our discipline have been reluctant to enter the analytical realm of love. They touched this theme, but only marginally. It is only relatively recently that more insightful and focused discussions have come from some key figures of contemporary sociology in works by Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Zygmunt Bauman and, more recently, Eva Illouz that demonstrate the profoundly social nature of our most intimate feelings and convey how the transformation of love and intimacy is related to wider social changes. In this sense, this collection edited by Silvia Cataldi and Gennaro Iorio aims to fill a major gap, while fuelling the debate on social love and its implications as a transformative force in an era characterised by multiple crises. By bringing together scholars from across several countries, not only it collates the fruit of years of research, but it also launches new developments in the debate on social love and set a new research agenda.
RESUMO
Italy was the first European country touched by COVID-19 and one of the most severely affected, with a death toll that overtook China's by mid-March 2020. As a result, lockdown measures aiming to mitigate - and eventually interrupt - the spread of COVID-19 proliferated during the first wave of the pandemic. The vast majority of these concerned the resident population, regardless of their status or country of origin, and mainly involved the closure of public offices and proscription of private activities with the aim of reducing mobility and social and physical contacts. Only a few concerned the foreign population and arriving irregular migrants. This article analyses migrant-related policy measures taken by the Italian government during the first wave of the pandemic that aimed to prevent infection and reduce the impact of COVID-19 among the population. These measures addressed two emergencies: the spread of COVID-19 that hit the resident population hard, regardless of origin or nationality, and the workforce shortages in some key economic sectors with a high number of irregular migrant workers. The former aimed at containing the spread of the virus (sections 4 and 5) and targeted foreigners already residing in Italy as well as irregular migrants arriving along the Mediterranean route; the latter aimed at addressing workforce shortages (section 6) as a result of borders that were closed to external seasonal migration. This article is a contribution to the debate on changes to migration and migrant policy, and how these impacted on migration and foreign populations during the pandemic.
RESUMO
The arrival of more than one million migrants, many of them refugees, has proved a major test for the European Union. Although international relief and monitoring agencies have been critical of makeshift camps in Calais and Eidomeni where infectious disease and overcrowding present major health risks, few have examined the nature of the official reception system and its impact on health delivery. Drawing upon research findings from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, this article considers the physical and mental health of asylum-seekers in transit and analyses how the closure of borders has engendered health risks for populations in recognised reception centres in Sicily and in Greece. Data gathered by means of a survey administered in Greece (300) and in Sicily (400), and complemented by in-depth interviews with migrants (45) and key informants (50) including representatives of government offices, humanitarian and relief agencies, NGOs and activist organisations, are presented to offer an analysis of the reception systems in the two frontline states. We note that medical provision varies significantly from one centre to another and that centre managers play a critical role in the transmission of vital information. A key finding is that, given such disparity, the criteria used by the UNHCR to grade health services reception do not address the substantive issue that prevent refugees from accessing health services, even when provided on site. Health provision is not as recorded in UNHCR reporting but rather there are critical gaps between provision, awareness, and access for refugees in reception systems in Sicily and in Greece. This article concludes that there is a great need for more information campaigns to direct refugees to essential services.