Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational' paradigm

Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand, and information science on the other – it is an illustration and prime example of bioinformationalism that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive cultural evolution. The concept of viral modernity applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education and emerging knowledge (journal) systems. This paper traces the relationship between epidemics, quarantine, and public health management and outlines elements of viral-digital philosophy (VDP) based on the fusion of living and technological systems. We discuss Covid-19 as a ‘bioinformationalist' response that represents historically unprecedented level of sharing information from the sequencing of the genome to testing for a vaccination. Finally, we look at the US response to Covid-19 through the lens of infodemics and post-truth. The paper is followed by three open reviews, which further refine its conclusions as they relate to (educational) philosophy and the notion of the virus as Pharmakon.

"To honour cleanness and shame filth”: medical facemasks as the narrative of nationalism and modernity in China

As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept across the world, the wearing of medical facemasks has become a hot topic on social media. In China, the relevant discourses are entangled with codes of medical science, national self-esteem and appropriated modernity. These discourses can be dated back to the narrative established by Dr Wu Lien-teh, the great fighter in the Manchurian plagues of 1910–1911 and 1920–1921. This paper reveals that Wu and his colleagues used different strategies when displaying to the Western world their achievements in the anti-plague battle and when proving the effectiveness of the Western medical and hygienic system to Chinese people. Wu and his colleagues used metonymies, analogues and metaphors on or related to medical facemasks to illustrate the possibility of building a modernised nation with sovereignty. Because the construction of a sanitary system in China has always been labelled as a patriotic movement (Rogaski, Ruth. 2004. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 285–298), the wearing of medical facemasks has constituted an important part of the narrative of nationalism and hygienic modernity. This discourse continues to play a significant role in today's campaign against the coronavirus.

Holy Communion in Greek Orthodoxy in the Time of Coronavirus: Ideological Perspectives in Conflict

This article examines the controversy over the mode of distribution of Holy Communion that surfaced during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on debates that took place in the Greek Orthodox community. After describing and evaluating the role of secular and religious experts in the context of the pandemic, the paper analyzes three main perspectives on the issue of the Eucharist: (1) the secularist-rationalist viewpoint;(2) the religious–traditionalist outlook;and (3) the "Third Way” perspective. The paper argues that the Church's Holy Communion controversy is indicative of a deeper struggle between religious and secular thinkers and among various voices in the Greek Orthodox Church concerning the latter's place in, and influence over, the modern secular socio-political order. © 2023 by the author.

Governing Rural Poverty on Urban Streets: Guangzhou's Management of Beggars in the Reform Era

This study investigates how discourses on panhandling intertwine with the governance of beggars on China's urban streets. It focuses on local policy implementation in Guangzhou city, led by the bureau of civil affairs along with its centres for "custody and repatriation” and "assistance stations.” The study aims to understand how the state regulates panhandling and engages with beggars in public spaces. Exploring the internal logic of the state's approach and how it has changed during the 40 years of reform, it also considers the junctures at which contradictions and conflicts arise. Based on fieldwork data (2011 to 2014) and the analysis of government documents, yearbooks, academic and mass media discourses, I argue that the state's treatment of panhandlers poses a conundrum as welfare measures conflict with control. While several layers of state regulation and actors contradict each other and create grey areas of state-induced informality, people who beg for alms are continuously criminalized and excluded from public space.

The Scalpel and the Brush: Explosion and Culture of the Pandemic Body

The article adopts the framework of Lotman's last cultural semiotics in order to rethink a thorny contemporary issue, that is, the diffused antagonism against science, medicine, and vaccinations during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemics. The article interprets this irrational animadversion as the outcome of a dialectics that stems at least from the origin of modernity, and precisely from the opposition between a semiotic ideology of stillness, regularity, and order, underpinning the genesis of modern science, and an opposed semiotic ideology of motion, irregularity, and chaos, characterizing most of the modern aesthetics of idealism and singularity. After exploring this opposition through a crucial cultural text situated at the beginning of the tension between these two different approaches to meaning and life, the article concludes that modern sciences and medicine should continue searching for regularities in the world and in the body, for the sake of improving the human quality of life, but should also learn from the cultural semiotics of aesthetic ideologies: in times of epistemic incertitude and turmoil, old myths extolling the singularity of the body tend to resurface, jeopardizing the credibility of medicine.

Guest editorial: The world of contemporary work and the digital economy

The Fourth Industrial Revolution has been shaping the new digital economy, platform economy or shared economy (Gandini, 2018;Fleming, 2017), starting with the rise and interconnection among innovations, technologies and devices, like IoT (Internet of Things), artificial intelligence (AI), as digital clouds, additive manufacturing (3D printing), cyber-physical systems, autonomous robotization, etc., which connect people, objects and systems, in an intense data exchange through digital media, at ever-growing speed. [...]a vast reflection and research field emerges, aiming at understanding the new impact of this configuration onto the organizational and work world, as means to identify what is permanent and what is variant, critical issues and potentialities, compromises and contradictions influencing the work processes, work organization, subjectivity construction per se, groups interaction and society cohesion. The fifth article analyses the influence of tele-commuting and management control systems on objective congruence, building on a survey conducted among employees of the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry. [...]we close this issue with a systematic bibliographic review article that aims at analyzing studies connecting Circular Economy and Industry 4.0, in the current worrisome scenario.

Risk and the Transformation of Everyday Places and Spaces: Emptiness and Meaning-Making in Daily Life Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic Hazardscape

During the COVID-19 pandemic, emergent geographies of empty space and its relationship to fears for one's health and wellbeing have replaced our traditional understanding of social space with a risk calculus. While quarantine is the ultimate form of the preoccupation of risk, it also provides a connotation of diseased space versus safe space and who can or cannot enter exclusive spaces designed to protect others. The risk society thesis posits the emergence of a risk ethos, the development of a collective risk identity, and the formation of communities united by an increased vulnerability to risk (Ekberg, Curr Sociol 55:344, 2007). Ultimately, Beck's (Risk society: toward a new modernity. SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1992) thesis of a second modernity asserts that "… the ethos of wealth creation that characterized industrial modernity has been overshadowed by an ethos of risk avoidance, class consciousness has been displaced by a risk consciousness and the increased awareness of living in an environment of risk, uncertainty, and insecurity has become a major catalyst for social transformation” Ekberg (Curr Sociol 55:344, 2007). This chapter offers perspective on the symbolic understanding of once populated spaces and places that are now empty spaces and places as stark symbols of the ubiquity of risk and emergence of a collective risk consciousness in geographies of risk. It illuminates how the transformation of common places and spaces into empty spaces present as a geography of risks "hazardscapes” in our lives while showing how the "language of risk” is understood in our daily lives in the grocery stores, public parks, and spaces, and in shared spaces to help us make meaning of our current reality and other realities (post-pandemic) to come. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Storybook Worlds Made Real: Essays on the Places Inspired by Children's Narratives ed. by Kathy Merlock Jackson and Mark I. West (review)

Any of us Fairytale and Fantasy aficionados know how well these tales burn into our hearts and provide us with countless hours of daydreaming material, but it is the potential of greatness that these stories open up for our often times limited waking life. Storybook worlds, as much as they are for our own nostalgia and connection to a natural world, serve as a money-making machine for industries that prey upon the scarcity of these literary spaces. With this book being released during a pandemic era, the impeccable timing allows for readers who have grown comfortable within the four walls of their home to travel through worlds that have been inaccessible during lockdowns and quarantines. The book allows for a strong sense of living vicariously through the eyes of the authors in the collections and takes readers through a journey of reflection and adventure that has simply not been an option for many of us post COVID-19. There is something for every reader in this collection, and in many ways some of the essays in this collection highlight the risk of these beautiful worlds being made into a media entity so far removed from the stories that taught empathy for all life, meaningful contemplation, and a deep respect for the natural world around us.

Introduction to the Symposium: Parasitism and the Logics of Anti-Indigeneity and Antiblackness

The more recent crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the contemporary protocols of the Western European-American parasitic paradigm. As any scholar of the Black Radical Tradition have argued, the emergence of global capitalism is indelibly tied to the emergence of the transatlantic slave trade and is constitutive of the emergence of Black(ness)/racialization of Black people. Furthermore, the underlying assumptions of Western modernity's so-called scientific paradigm for comprehending the world, facilitates the justification of the ascendancy of whiteness in a hierarchy of being. Both racial capitalism and coloniality of being embodies the parasitism of the modern world-system that results in the dynamics of the pandemic.

Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (review)

The book begins with bacterial meningitis, an infection the author contracted in early childhood that left her with "profound-to-severe" hearing loss (Virdi, 7). Not only do we see her as a scholar in the archive, requesting permission to try a Victorian ear trumpet, we also see her as a child with her d/Deaf classmates, being fitted for hearing aids "as we squirmed and giggled when the wet silicone mold was injected into our ears," and as an adult, experiencing difficulty switching from analog to digital hearing aids (258). When Virdi's first pair of behindthe-ear hearing aids make her six-year-old ears stick out, and her hair "tied in a long braid as per the Sikh tradition, did little to disguise them," it is the hearing aids, not the braid, that provoke "snickers, puzzled glances, and finger-pointing from younger children" (18).

Utu-centric Philo-Praxis: Engaging with our common futures beyond the Anthropocene

In this text, Cheikh Thiam starts from the postulation that even though the history of pan-African engagement has always been conscious of the necessity of an epistemic stance that underscores the need to "delink" from the pervasiveness of coloniality, specialists of Africana studies have too often created an imagined idea of Africa framed around its difference (or similarities) with the idea of Europe while they conceive of the African subject as a Black- way-of-being-White. Building on the decolonial Africana tradition, Thiam argues that a careful exegesis of African ontologies, epistemologies, and socio-political organizations founded on utu-centric worldviews offers an epistemic option that creates the possibility to think outside of the limits of the modernity/coloniality dialectic by providing us with a radically decentered epistemic framework. Such an endogenous and decolonial framework offers the possibility to engage differently with the idea and allows, in turn, a way to engage differently with some of the most critical issues that our world faces today, namely, "White Supremacy and environmental inequity pointed out by the recent outcry that followed the murder of George Floyd and the current COVID 19 pandemic

Higher Education Development and Student Mobility During Crises: From a Comparative and Historical Perspective

More advanced transportation and a much flatter world structure accelerate the internationalization process of higher education, and which also makes it possible for the virus to spread quickly around the world. [...]in the age of globalization, there are much more potential factors that may cause global/regional social crises. Harari (2018) proposed in his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century that human beings are now facing new challenges caused by global warming, big data algorithms, and terrorism, and "when the old stories have collapsed, no new story has emerged so far to replace them.” [...]although the nature of medieval universities still more or less influences the current higher education, while anticipating the future trend of cross-border student mobility, it seems more appropriate to use the premodern history as a supplement, rather than evidence for proving that history repeats itself. According to the university archives, "over 500 UNC students had been treated in the infirmary and seven had died as a result of complications with the illness” (Cozens, 2020, para. 10). [...]presently, the State of New York is still the second most popular destination for international students in the U.S., and New York University in the City of New York "has been the leading host university for international students” since 2013 (Zong & Batalova, 2018, para. 16).

the disease of expertise

The Disease of Expertise, is a poem composed by poet, playwright, musician and researcherTawona Sitholé. Within the poem,Sitholé challenges the contemporary constructs of modernity, knowledge, and knowledge production in the scope of globalized economies. Utilizing Covid-19 and the corresponding global pandemic as a backdrop into the inquiry of knowledge, and economic development Sitholé incorporates his own lived experience and local knowledge to highlight contemporary issues relating to globalization, structural inequities, and questions of knowledge within the Global South.

Health without security?

An interview with Mark Neocleous about health, security, biopolitics, COVID-19, immunology, medicine, liberalism, police is presented. Neocleous mentions "It began when I was writing a book on the concept of police. I discovered this wonderful line of Marx in his essay on the Jewish question, where he says, 'Security is the supreme social concept of bourgeois society, the concept of police'. He brought them together in a very direct and immediate way. I thought it was an insightful observation, which gets to the heart of how security underpins everything that is done in the name of police. By using the term police I'm not referring to the narrowest sense of the word, the uniformed, professionalized police services, but the whole range of ways in which the state polices civil society, which is what Marx was alluding to. So, my interest in security originally stems from a critical engagement with the police concept. Since then I have been trying to think them together - more recently, combined with the logic of war, again understood in the broadest sense to incorporate the social wars of capitalist modernity."

Implicit Racial Bias Across Ethnoracial Groups in Canada and the United States and Black Mental Health

Black Canadians and Americans experience disparities in access to quality mental health care and mental health overall. Implicit biases are unconscious, automatically activated attitudes and stereotypes, with the potential to yield racist behaviors. To date, research has focused on health provider bias and resultant consequences in the decision-making/treatment of racialized groups. Little has been done to characterize implicit anti-Black biases within White and non-White members of the general population or examine the relationship between biases and Black people's mental wellness. Black-White Implicit Association Test (BW-IAT;n = 450,185) data were used to detect the presence of implicit biases within 10 ethnoracial groups and compare Bias Scores between Canada and the United States. Mean BW-IAT Bias Scores were also assessed against participant explicit biases using warmth ratings and the Modern Racism Scale (MRS). Finally, state-level BW-IAT scores were used to predict state-based Black American mental health-related mortality using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) data set. Findings indicated: (a) the most ethnoracial groups have anti-Black implicit biases;(b) Canadian and American implicit biases are near identical;(c) explicit and implicit Bias Scores are weakly related, and Canadian and American explicit biases are near identical;and (d) implicit bias predicts poor mental health outcomes for Black Americans, even when controlling for explicit bias and White outcomes. This work underscores the need to dismantle ideologies of White superiority and the resultant oppressive attitudes, stereotypes, and behaviors present in the general population. This work also calls for accessible, province-level, race-based mental health data on underserved groups.Alternate :Les Canadiens noirs et les Afro-Américains font face à des disparités en ce qui concerne leur accès à des soins de santé mentale et particulièrement des soins de santé mentale de qualité. Les préjugés implicites sont des attitudes et des stéréotypes inconscients, soient des pensées automatiques, qui peuvent potentiellement provoquer des comportements racistes. Jusqu'à présent, les recherches à ce sujet ont mis une emphase sur les préjugés des prestataires de soins de santé et les conséquences qui en découlent dans la prise de décision et le traitement des groupes racialisés. Peu d'études ont été menées dans le but de mettre en évidence les préjugés implicites anti-Noirs chez les personnes de race blanche et les personnes d'autres races parmi la population générale ou d'examiner la relation entre les préjugés et le bien-être mental des Noirs. Les données du Black-White Implicit Association Test (BW-IAT;n = 450 185) ont été utilisées pour déterminer la présence de préjugés implicites au sein de 10 groupes ethnoraciaux et comparer les scores des préjugés entre le Canada et les États-Unis. Les scores moyens des préjugés du BW-IAT ont également été évalués par rapport aux préjugés explicites des participants à l'aide des warmth ratings et du Modern Racism Scale. Par la suite, les scores BW-IAT dans les différents États ont été utilisés pour prédire le taux de mortalité lié à la santé mentale des Noirs américains à l'aide de l'ensemble de données CDC WONDER. Les résultats indiquent que (1) la plupart des groupes ethnoraciaux ont des préjugés implicites anti-Noirs;(2) les préjugés implicites canadiens et américains sont presque identiques;(3) les scores de préjugés explicites et implicites ont une faible corrélation, et les préjugés explicites canadiens et américains sont presque identiques;et (4) les préjugés implicites prédisent de conséquences négatives sur la santé mentale des Noirs américains, même en contrôlant les préjugés explicites et les résultats des personnes blanches. Ces travaux soulignent la nécessité de démanteler, au sein de la population dans son ensemble, es idéologies de supériorité de la race blanche et les attitudes, stéréotypes et comportements oppressifs qui en découlent. Ce travail appelle également à l'accessibilité des données sur la santé mentale axées sur la race des groupes faiblement desservis, au niveau provincial.

Rewriting the hills: Youth sociality as a mode of navigating unemployment in a context of outmigration in North India

This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration', but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Movement pedagogies in pandemic times: Extinction Rebellion Netherlands and (un)learning from the margins

This article is based on activist research conducted alongside Extinction Rebellion Netherlands. By taking a pedagogical approach to social movements, it posits that Extinction Rebellion Netherlands is simultaneously bound up in the reproduction of and resistance to dominant ways of knowing and being. It discusses how ‘pedagogies of urgency' reproduce the learning of hegemonic forms of life associated with modernity/coloniality. Treating the movement's margins as a privileged space of epistemological possibility, it examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted who is ‘heard, seen and rendered knowing' [Motta & Esteves. (2014). Reinventing emancipation in the 21st century: The pedagogical practices of social movements. Interface, 6(1), 1–24, p. 5)]. This has facilitated the unlearning of pedagogies of urgency, and the learning of new relationships, subjectivities and knowledges that centre justice, prefiguration, and building relations across difference. Nevertheless, the pandemic also underscores some of the impossibilities for learning and dialogue inherent in the exclusions and violence at the heart of modern/colonial power relations.

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.

Dies irae: ¿Por qué las democracias liberales no logran domesticar la ira y la violencia?

El siglo XXI ha estado marcado por innumerables protestas callejeras en diferentes regiones del mundo desatadas a su vez por disímiles coyunturas políticas. El artículo tiene dos objetivos: primero, proponer las emociones políticas de la rabia, el resentimiento y el deseo de reconocimiento como categorías interpretativas de las expresiones de inconformidad ciudadanas frente a la política contemporánea. Segundo, advertir que la incapacidad de las democracias liberales para domesticar la violencia constituye uno de los mayores fracasos de la modernidad política. Así, a partir de la lectura crítica de los filósofos políticos contemporáneos más relevantes en el ámbito occidental, ambos objetivos mostrarán que la crisis de las democracias liberales y del capitalismo tiene raíces estructurales y que demandan la reinvención del paradigma triunfante en 1989 conocido como el Fin de la Historia.Alternate abstract:The 21st century has been marked by countless street protests in different regions of the world that have been unleashed by dissimilable political circumstances. The article has two objectives: first, to propose the political emotions of rage, resentment and desire for recognition as interpretative categories of expressions of citizen dissatisfaction vis-a-vis contemporary politics. Secondly, to warn that the inability of liberal democracies to domesticate violence is one of the greatest failures of political modernity. Thus, from the critical reading of the most relevant contemporary political philosophers in the Western sphere, both objectives will show that the crisis of liberal democracies and capitalism has structural roots and demand the reinvention of the triumphant paradigm in 1989 known as the End of History.

Decolonial dialogues: COVID-19 and migrant women's remembrance as resistance

This contribution presents a text-journey documenting decolonial moments experienced during COVID-19 with other migrant women from Pakistan residing in the Netherlands. It explores women's negotiations of epistemic disregard experienced during integration, by means of Urdu language proverbs that arose during our conversations. Through remembrance, the presence of relationalities and multiple temporalities [Vazquez (2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115] are expressed in knowledge practices we have brought from Pakistan. This raises crucial questions: How do relational and temporal dimensions (in)form migrant women's practices and struggles? In what ways do migrant women defy modern knowledges and follow their ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing? In addressing these questions, a decolonial approach is used to create (alternative) spaces, for those bodies that are relational and are sites of memory and temporality. Maria Lugones' [(1987). Playfulness, "world”-travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19] concept of world traveling and Rolando Vazquez's [(2009). Modernity coloniality and visibility: The politics of time. Sociological Research Online, 14(4), 109–115;Vazquez, R. (October 2015). Relational temporalities: From modernity to the decolonial. Unpublished manuscript] concepts of plural temporalities and relationality are used as a framework to understand remembrance as resistance to dominant world views.