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Youth withdrawal or 'stagnant youth' – such as hikikomori in Japan, NEET in Europe, and the lying flat movement in China – has been widely observed in recent decades. Seen as a culture- or geography-based and discrete phenomenon, however, its global connections across times and spaces are overlooked. Through the lens of globality or global consciousness of connectivity, this article explores how a news report on China's lying flat movement was discussed by global youth on Reddit, an online idea exchange platform, and how this collective reading event has enabled their senses of transplanetary connectivity and generational solidarity. I argue that consciousness of connectivity, especially from the perspectives of those who are habitually peripheralized, can function as an important entry point to better understanding the shared predicaments, as well as potentials, of young people who feel stuck or 'out of place and pace' at the current stage of contemporary globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a review of the emergent literature on 'vaccine nationalism' - the act of gaining preferential access to newly developed vaccines by individual countries - in the context of COVID-19, paying close attention to the complex relationships between the global public health crisis and globalization. The coexistence of nationalist and globalist approaches to COVID-19 vaccines suggests simultaneous and contentious processes of globalization and deglobalization; the growing political and economic divide in the world; the lack of (or lag in) our consciousness of global interconnectedness, especially in non-economic spheres; and various structural barriers to global collaboration when facing a common threat to humanity's future. Although these tensions - not necessarily novel - are unlikely to end globalization given the extant intertwining of global economic networks, they have been sharpened and intensified during the pandemic and, thus, constitute a pivotal - or make-or-break - moment for us to critically imagine a postpandemic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid global transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 raises questions about the intersections of globalization, time, and diseases. Viewing it as a disease of speed, this article examines SARS as a case of emerging infectious diseases in the context of contemporary globalization. We contend that the SARS crisis exposed the limitations of traditional spatiality-based approaches to infectious diseases, disease control, and health governance. When the advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in recent decades have accelerated the diffusion of pathogens, actors at all levels of global public health are pressed to keep up with the new temporalities. While cognitive and organizational innovations arising from technological changes show some hope for addressing these issues on a global level, other temporality-related challenges—such as differential capacities of the affected countries to respond to the simultaneity of the crisis—are yet to be tackled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including globalization in respect to financial and environmental crises, impact of materiality on globalization, and relationship between human consciousness of material rhythms and time.