Search

This paper explores how masculinity may help us understand the varying ways political leaders are responding to the coronavirus crisis. By focusing directly on masculinity as a social process, this analysis contributes to the broader literature on gender and leadership, unpacking the gendered double bind that leaders who identify as men must navigate in acknowledging and responding to risks. I examine the responses of Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump suggesting that their respective struggles to acknowledge and respond to the public health threat were not simply the result of a lack of available information to inform rational policy decisions. Acknowledging risk and taking measures to prevent rather than 'fight' are not culturally neutral, they are coded as feminine and 'weak'. Clearly, the delay in the response and subsequent spread of the virus in North America was not inevitable, other jurisdictions were able to respond more quickly. The masculinity double bind may have been one of the factors that undermined a prompt response in the increasingly macho context of North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this brief paper, I argue that the coronavirus pandemic is functioning like an ethnomethodological 'breaching experiment'. In short, it is putting a gigantic spanner in the works of neoliberal governance, in the process exposing the widening cracks and fissures of what I have called the 'fractured society'. I begin by recalling Garfinkel's notion of the breaching experiment and by listing the principal attributes of the fractured society. I then explore the response to the coronavirus in the UK, from the government's initial commitment to 'herd immunity' to its present policy of 'muddling through'. The bulk of the remainder of this contribution addresses precisely how this global health crisis shines a harsh and unforgiving searchlight on the strategies and policies pursued by governments in the UK since 2010, and most especially after the passing of the Health and Social Care Act of 2012. In the closing paragraphs, I examine possible scenarios for a post-fractured society, making particular use of Fraser's concepts on 'reactionary' versus 'progressive populism', and conclude with a comment on sociology and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, public health has increasingly addressed what has been called the children's obesity 'epidemic', most notably through large-scale initiatives promoting physical activity. Through a discourse analysis the current paper critically examines such efforts in Canadian and Australian public health. Public health websites in Canada and Australia were examined for information concerning children's health, physical activity and obesity and explored for how these issues were represented in the discourse. Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be?' approach to discourse analysis guided our interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying Canadian and Australian public health discourse, the ideological and political influences involved in its construction, and the knowledge base upon which it rests. The article calls for critical reflection on how children's physical and leisure activities are being advanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2003, avian influenza has recently spread around the world sparking fears of a potential pandemic. As a result of this, a range of explanations and expectations surrounding the phenomenon were generated. Such social representations of disease depict the issue under discussion and frame reactions to the event. This paper explores the social representations surrounding avian influenza in Australia. Methodologically, a textual analysis of media and government documents was conducted in order to uncover the social representations implicit in these accounts. This demonstrated a symbolic framing of avian influenza with reference to the Spanish Influenza pandemic (1918). Analytically, the study draws upon the concepts of social representations from Durkheim and of risk and symbolic risk in the work of Beck. Overall, it is argued that the framing of avian influenza as a risk, mediated through the collective memory of Spanish Influenza, characterised the nature of the social representations surrounding the phenomenon. This resulted in the production of symbolic solutions to the threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) and medical devices needed during the COVID-19 pandemic were widely reported in early 2020. In response, civic DIY volunteers explored how they could produce the required equipment. Members of communities such as hacker- and makerspaces employed their skills and tools to manufacture, for example, face shields and masks. The article discusses these civic innovation practices and their broader social implications by relating them to critical making theory. Methodologically, it is based on a digital ethnography approach, focusing on hacker and maker communities in the UK. Communities' DIY initiatives display characteristics of critical making and 'craftivism', as they assessed and counteracted politicised healthcare supply shortages. It is argued that their manufacturing activities during the COVID pandemic relate to UK austerity politics' effects on healthcare and government failure to ensure medical crisis supplies. Facilitated by open source design, communities' innovation enabled healthcare emergency equipment. At the same time, their DIY manufacturing raises practical as well as ethical issues concerning, among other things, efficacy and safety of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management of a pandemic engages multiple sites where previously settled or uncontroversial understandings may be transformed by global and domestic forces. This article examines the iconography of social distancing implicated in the discourses of 'quarantine' and 'risk control' in public health, and the tension between scientific and popular media readings of the contours of acceptable public health models for managing particular pandemics. The role of culture in shaping and reshaping borders at an operational level is explored as a basis for explaining the apparent paradoxes in the way historic and contemporary pandemics are actually managed, and the different ways particular pandemics are framed. The article argues that a rational-scientific approach to pandemic management is insufficient and that a more nuanced socio-political blend of science, culture and public perceptions offers a more substantial basis for public health policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]