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The COVID-19 pandemic and the move to remote education exposed old and new inequities, yet it also represented anopportunity to rethink inclusive education. This paper presents findings from a one-year project DIGITAL in a time of Coronavirus anddraws upon policy analysis and interviews with teachers, principals, and community leaders from six countries in the Global North andSouth (Italy, England, Malaysia, Australia, United States and Chile). By mobilising education assemblage theory to challenge binarydivisions (included/excluded, modern/colonial, local/global), it presents five concepts to rethink inclusion and its relationship withtechnologies. It illustrates how during the pandemic alternative entanglements of digital and non-digital technologies challengednarrow and Eurocentric constructions of the digital divide enabling inclusive subjective experiences. Drawing upon local possibilitiesand histories, re-habilitating non-scientific knowledges, especially in view of future experiences of blended education, the paper seeksto provide policy tools to rethink current understandings of inclusive education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on transportation across the United States. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the pandemic's impact on vehicular traffic at the later stage of the pandemic. Therefore, this paper studies the change of freeway traffic patterns in two metropolitan counties in the State of Utah at the latter stage of the pandemic. We found that with the relaxation of travel restriction and the COVID vaccine, vehicular traffic has recovered to equaling, if not exceeding, pre-pandemic levels. Truck traffic is higher than the pre-pandemic level due to the growth of online shopping and on-demand delivery. To help responsive agencies to prepare for the near-future traffic pattern, a traffic prediction model based on an innovative approach integrating machine learning with graph theory is proposed. The evaluation shows that the proposed prediction model has a desirable performance. The mean absolute percentage prediction error is between 0.38% and 1.74% for different jurisdictions. On average, the modal outperforms the traditional long short-term memory model by 31.20% in terms of root mean squared prediction error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted every aspect of our lives, from economic to the social facets of contemporary society. While the new COVID-19 waves may not be anticipated to be as severe as previous ones, it would be unreasonable to assume that they will cease any time soon. Consequently, forecasting the number of future infections, recovered patients, and death cases remains a very much logical step in trying to fight against further waves, in conjunction with ongoing vaccination efforts. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of three intelligent machine learning algorithms, namely GMDH, Bi-LSTM, and GA + NN, for COVID-19 forecasting, with an application to Iran and the United Kingdom. The experimental results show that the algorithms can be used to forecast the next six months of COVID-19 in terms of confirmed, recovered, and death cases, which gives a more ample timeframe for using the results to make better practical yet strategic decisions and take appropriate actions or measures to deploy resources effectively to contain or curb the spread of the coronavirus. Despite the distinct dynamics observed in the data, our analysis proves the robustness of the employed models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relationships between nationalism and conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on the two main issues: 1) the intensity and character of belief in the COVID-19 conspiracy theories across five European societies: Germany, England, Ireland, Serbia, and Sweden; and 2) how is the commitment to specific nationalist ideologies linked with the belief in conspiracy theories. The data indicates that those who described themselves as highly religious and politically right-wing are more prone to believe in the strong versions of conspiracy theories. Furthermore, primordialism and the nation-centric view of the world are positively correlated with the propensity towards stronger versions of conspiracy theories. The paper zooms in on the significant differences across the five countries: the Serbian respondents stand out in terms of their strong beliefs in conspiracy theories while the Irish and Serbian respondents who are prone to strong version of conspiratorial thinking also subscribe more to the primordialist understanding of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-oriented policing (COP) is a policing philosophy that focuses on the co-production of public safety by police officers and the community members they serve. This paper utilized the extreme context presented by the COVID−19 pandemic to test the theoretical assumptions on which COP is based. The data presented in this paper were collected from 32 community police officers (CPOs) from a Canadian police service who attended six focus group sessions during the fourth wave of the pandemic (July to November 2021). We summarize key findings and insights from these focus groups and provide insights relating to the underlying mechanisms essential to the delivery of effective COP programs. Future studies should continue to examine COP in diverse contexts to understand its benefits and challenges more fully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How liberal governments manage knowledge, ignorance, prediction and uncertainty has attracted increased attention across the social sciences. In this paper, we analyse the strategy and rhetoric of the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to the first half of 2020. We see the initial UK policy response – as well as its later legitimation – as a form of 'politics of impossibility', effecting political change through claims of incapacity or impotence. We argue this approach departs from the uses of knowledge and ignorance in both classical liberalism and neoliberalism, and suggests the emergence of a new, hybrid form of governance which can be dubbed liberal fatalism. We discuss the relevance of this new form of governance for political futures of an increasingly volatile world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Spring 2020, the UK Government announced the cessation of in-person teaching for the vast majority of school-aged children in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Prompting an accelerated shift towards digital learning across the curriculum, this announcement was accompanied by a rise in market-based solutions to address the problem of keeping young people active, 'healthy' and 'positive' whilst at home. The most prominent of these was offered by Joe Wicks, who broadcasted PE with Joe live globally via YouTube for five days per week for eighteen weeks. The aim of this paper is to critically explore some of the contextual factors that enabled Joe Wicks to create and legitimise a public health intervention under the title of physical education, and henceforth position himself (whether intentionally or not) as an authoritative agent for change within the discipline. After outlining who Joe Wicks is, we unpack the discursive framing of PE with Joe in order to locate Wicks' intervention amid the perennial politics of physical education. We then consider the meaning of PE with Joe and why Joe Wicks' involvement in physical education matters, reflecting upon the effects of Joe Wicks on the future of physical education practice and research. Among our conclusions is that the Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for Joe Wicks – here positioned and understood as a branded, celebrity lifestyle enterprise – to manoeuvre himself (and his products) from the periphery to the centre of physical education's public imagery and discourse. Furthermore, we argue that exploring the ways in which Wicks' presence in the physical education space has been received, embraced, modified, challenged and resisted is vital in discerning PE with Joe's actual or perceived effects on the social construction of physical education, and the educational engagements of young people in physical activity in the post-Covid-19 landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether global uncertainty predicts economic growth rates using a global sample of 136 countries. We use the panel regression model and find strong evidence that global uncertainty negatively predicts the economic growth rate. Further, the negative impact of global uncertainty on economic growth rates is amplified during pandemic periods versus non-pandemic periods. Our main findings hold after a range of robustness tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of papers we have put together for this special themed section originally emerged from a desire to explore how the rapid and wholescale transformation of everyday spaces brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic might change, challenge and shift experiences and understandings of the gendered body. Since 2020, we have witnessed and experienced the dramatic alteration of everyday mobilities and a concurrent reconfiguration of spatial and embodied relations. The pandemic, and responses to it, has transformed the locations in which subjects routinely situate themselves, and the quotidian bodily practices they participate in, with immediate and lasting impact. Such a moment called for a revisiting of established theoretical and methodological paradigms in feminist geography - many of which developed from within the pages of this journal - which understand the relationship between space and the gendered body to be a mutually constitutive one. If the gendered body is understood as a processual assemblage shaped by the spaces within which it is formed, what do such radical spatial reconfigurations of embodied relations mean for gendered subjects? These papers, then, represent an opportunity to revisit and reflect upon core debates about gender, embodiment, and space in feminist geography, understanding the pandemic via a gendered lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on fieldwork conducted during lockdown in Denmark among users of services at the intersection of homelessness and drug use. The paper bridges two distinct approaches to understanding the relation between marginalization and crisis, with one focused on the impact of "big events" on marginalized populations, and another on everyday strategies employed to survive situations of homelessness and drug use. The paper shows how past experiences of hardship became relevant for coping with pandemic crisis. It further exploreshow, through critical engagement with dominant accounts of vulnerability, research participants carved out a space for negotiating their marginality in the Danish welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of scarce healthcare resources consistently presented significant moral and practical challenges. While the importance of vaccines as a key pharmaceutical intervention to stem pandemic scarcity was widely publicized, a sizable proportion of the population chose not to vaccinate. In response, some have defended the use of vaccination status as a criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this paper, we critically interpret this burgeoning literature, and describe a framework for thinking about vaccine-sensitive resource allocation using the values of responsibility, reciprocity, and justice. Although our aim here is not to defend a single view of vaccine-sensitive resource allocation, we believe that attending critically with the diversity of arguments in favor (and against) vaccine-sensitivity reveals a number of questions that a vaccine-sensitive approach to allocation should answer in future pandemics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ethnographic case study of a private television newsroom owned by a newly merged and dominant media company in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium). Through ethnographic observations and interviews along with desk research and surveys, carried out throughout 2020 both physically and virtually, we operationalise a previously developed model for pinpointing changes inside newsrooms. Our study shows once more that when newsrooms are confronted with changing circumstances, in this case, due to a merger, contemplation about how to address these changes happens largely behind closed doors on the management level, in the meantime leading to frustration amongst employees fearing that their professional identities and practices will be absolved in the newly to be created company structure. Involuntarily, our field study was affected by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which we turned into an opportunity to explore the methodological consequences for ethnographic observations that in the future are bound to be taking place in increasingly hybrid newsrooms and other work settings. Finally, we highlight the importance of studying both physical and virtual spaces in which journalists produce news content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst NHS Health Service management is usually characterized by hierarchized bureaucracy and profit-driven competitiveness, the COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted these ways of working and allowed London-based non-clinical management to experience their roles otherwise. This paper is based on 35 interviews with senior non-clinical management at a London-based NHS Trust during 'Alpha phase' of Britain's pandemic response (May-August 2020), an oft-overlooked group in the literature. I will draw upon Graeber's theory of "total bureaucratization" to argue that though the increasing neo-liberalization of the health-services has hitherto contributed toward a corporate mentality, the pandemic gave managers a chance to experience more collaboration and freedom than usual, which ultimately led to more effective realization of decision-making and change. The pandemic has shown NHS managers that there are alternatives to neoliberal logics of competition and hierarchy, and that those alternatives actually result in happier and effectively, more capable staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world in 2020 presented Australia with a world on fire, in lock down, and in environmental ruin, with potentially unprecedented social dislocation, homelessness, unemployment and mental health issues. Four artists reaction was to collaborate in an attempt to make sense of the complex COVID-19 context that was unfolding in front of them. Their interdisciplinary collaboration resulted in the multimedia artwork: Contested Spaces. Two iterations of the artwork (2020 and 2021) were exhibited as the artists navigated the unfolding spaces inhabited as they learnt to live and cope under the strictures of COVID-19. The 2021 iteration, was part of a national arts and mental health focus consisting of exhibitions, talks and workshops at the National Art School in Sydney and ECU Galleries in Perth. Through Contested Spaces the artists explored the complexity of unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. Working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries, created a space in which alternate understandings manifested as a consequence of the situation. This paper argues that the ongoing narrative of COVID-19 needs to be examined and scrutinized, in reconsidering our constant perpetual present, one that contests ideas and art making processes, proffering interdisciplinarity methods as a productive means for critiquing everyday pandemic complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on sports events management from a Principal-Agent (PA) Theory perspective. By applying the known elements of the PA-relationship to sports events organized during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts (n = 15) from both the event owners and managers sides were interviewed, examining perspectives on the pandemics impacts on operations, relationships, and interactions between these two main actors. Results suggest while unique operational challenges in staging events during the height of the pandemic were experienced, positive outcomes in areas such as PA-communication, collaboration, operational efficiencies, and acceptance of digitization advancements were also seen. The results also indicate lessons learned that can be carried forward into the future. In applying the PA-Theory from economics to sports events, practical and scientific contributions are provided by examining the impacts of extended crisis on the PA-Relationship in sports events in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a steep rise in demand for COVID-recovery lending and a decrease in capacity for infrastructure borrowing in many countries struggling to cope with its economic effects. This has presented a significant challenge to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), as its project pipelines had been developed mainly for traditional infrastructure lending. This paper examines the strategies employed by the AIIB to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings showcase how its institutional leadership effectively employed its authority, resources, and leadership competences to push for an adaptive response strategy. This was achieved by pitching a response based on the expansion of the AIIB's operational scope beyond traditional heavy infrastructure lending and the introduction of new policy instruments for funding COVID-recovery projects. The AIIB also engaged in collaborative partnerships with other MDBs to access their project pipelines and expertise. Thanks to these efforts, the AIIB not only managed to cope with the challenge, but its leadership also ensured the institution would come out of the pandemic having opportunistically benefited from it. The findings speak to the scholarship on IO resilience and bureaucratic politics. The analysis relies on official documents and original data from 20 interviews with IO officials and experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many studies that have focussed on the different dimensions of employment in several industries during COVID-19. However, the impact of the pandemic on employment in the tourism industries has been underexplored. Moreover, we are not aware of any study that has considered the impact of the pandemic on employment in different sub-sectors within the tourism industries. This paper analyzes the effect of COVID-19 on employment in Australian tourism industries using fractional integration. Using quarterly data (2004-2021) and disaggregating data by sectors, we examine two samples, one ending in December 2019 and the other one in December 2021. The novelty of this study is the consideration of the effect of this pandemic on employment in different sub-sectors that constitute the tourism industry. Our results indicate that the current pandemic has not produced significant changes in the persistence of the series. The only significant changes take place for the retail trade industry that moves from mean reversion to lack of it, and the cafes and restaurants in the opposite direction. One of the implications of the results is that interventions before the pandemic, such as concerted marketing efforts, are useful to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on tourism related industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the everyday life of U.S. families during 2020. This paper examines how the dramatic changes to schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the capitalization of established good schools into home prices in the Las Vegas urban area. Our findings show evidence that the pandemic changes negatively impacted the capitalization of school compared to the pre-pandemic period. We provide hypotheses tests for the potential mechanisms behind this effect. We find that the estimated pandemic effect was driven by the combination of a strong housing demand and a more elastic housing supply during the pandemic period. We estimate a flexible hedonic specification which accounts for unobserved neighborhood quality using a combination of spatial and temporal neighborhood fixed effects. Our estimates account for the spatial distribution in COVID-19 cases, school peer effects, alternative school choices and changes in the housing demand and supply over the pandemic period. Overall, the results tend to suggest that the changes took place during the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected homebuyers' preferences for neighborhood public schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis has triggered political tensions involving different levels of government. Italy constitutes a paradigmatic example of such problems. The powers assigned to regional presidents as a result of the dynamics of presidentialization make them key players in Italy's fragmented multilevel system. The article aims to demonstrate that the conflict between national and regional governments during the pandemic has been based mainly on polity reasons, that is regional governments' ambition to strengthen their autonomy, rather than on policy arguments. The Covid-19 crisis in Italy has taken the form of an intergovernmental conflict over the balance of authority between central and regional governments. This state of affairs has complicated the attempts at establishing a satisfactory level of coordination between the levels of government, has resulted in a fragmented response to the crisis, and has triggered a systemic conflict between levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars mobilized their efforts to address its far-reaching societal problems. With mobility restrictions being front and center of the pandemic, a new cohort of transportation science was developed within a short period of time. Here, we examine more than 400 studies related to COVID-19 published across transportation journals during 2020 and 2021. The aim is (i) to scope this newly developed segment of transportation research, (ii) outline the diversity of pandemic-related issues across various divisions of the transportation field and (iii) provide a roadmap for the future of this line of research. Common themes are identified and existing congruence and discrepancies across findings are discussed. Results show that although conventional methods of transportation research were adopted in virtually all COVID-19 studies, no pre-pandemic study was particularly instrumental in the development of this segment of transportation literature. The COVID-19 segment appears to have developed its own independent knowledge foundation, in that, it does not systemically and frequently look back at any particular pre-pandemic reference. Potential impacts of this newly developed segment on the metrics of transportation journals are quantified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study utilized a concurrent, triangulation mixed method design to explore pandemic mental health dynamics in the context of technology usage. We surveyed 406 adults from predominantly rural regions in the US (n = 118 LGBTQ+-identifying) (Step 1), and completed follow-up in-depth interviews with n = 43 LGBTQ + people from the original sample (Step 2). Our integrated findings highlight how LGBTQ + people’s heightened mental health concerns were related to downstream processes and patterns of heavily relying on certain technologies, smartphones in particular, during the pandemic. Service providers and policymakers can utilize the findings to tailor effective LGBTQ + programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite LGBTQ + serving organizations being bastions of education, support, and advocacy for LGBTQ + communities, there is a dearth of work on LGBTQ + people’s experiences with them. Through qualitative interviews with U.S. LGBTQ + residents (N = 19), we explore what LGBTQ + people experienced from LGBTQ + serving organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings highlight the challenges, barriers, and support that LGBTQ + people encountered, the meaning they received from LGBTQ + serving organizations, and the tensions between caring for self and others. We provide recommendations for how LGBTQ + serving organizations can better meet the needs of diverse LGBTQ + people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mitigation policies during the COVID-19 pandemic were justified on benefit-cost-analysis (BCA) grounds, with the value of a statistical life (VSL) measuring the benefit of saving lives. This essay argues that a BCA and VSL framework is not a value-neutral basis for pandemic policy: first because the characterization of labor-market behavior as choices merely regarding money and risk of mortality implicitly endorses those institutions that constrain such choices, as illustrated by pandemic economic conditions; and second because this characterization assumes that individual subjects have exogenous preferences, and accordingly have one "true" valuation, thus ignoring how subjectivity is constituted by capitalist institutions. Such VSL estimates in pandemic scholarship illustrate the search for a single valuation regarding elderly life, whereas the "good" of human life warrants valuation in our capacity as citizens in democratic institutions rather than as market agents. The language of overdetermination highlights the contradictory effects of the mutual constitution of institutions and the individual subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]