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The global reality of the COVID-19/Corona pandemic paradoxically boosted national politics, broadcasting and citizenship. Media coverage, especially initially, praised citizen solidarity and the creative solutions that were pioneered to care for each other. A year later, a lasting social learning curve throughout and after this crisis seems illusory. The pandemic, this paper argues, needs to be understood in a longer timeframe as the working through and coming to terms with neo-liberal governmentality. The (often hilarious) early responses on social media provide a strong entry to do so. Our focus will be on the Netherlands which had a so-called 'intelligent' lockdown during the first wave of COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. Using the authors' own sharing back and forth of toilet paper memes as a starting point, we aim to explore the notion of collective self-reflection and citizen co-education underlying both heated and simply ridiculous posts. Using previous discussion of cultural citizenship, this paper inquires into how pandemic citizenship played out as a vast exercise in disciplining and distinction through jokes and anger. The material suggests a nostalgic turn that might point to an implicitly voiced critique of neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper explores my first hand experience of illness during the first weeks of the pandemic, as a PhD student. Through an auto ethnographic lens, I narrate events which occurred during the month of March 2020. My memories, and their interpretation, continued to transform in the subsequent months, coinciding with the analysis of an earlier set of participants data and writing of the thesis. This paper draws upon such experiences to raise methodological and existential questions in relation to design research and healthcare. The short paper is structured in two parts; the first describes a few memory fragments to help the reader connect with that initial experience, whilst the second discusses the methodological and existential implications alongside a personal reflection, as an invitation for further dialogue within our research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has brought to unavoidable prominence what feminist geopolitics has long insisted, namely that the global and the intimate are always, everywhere, already entangled. Drawing on Anglo-American experiences of the pandemic, this paper aims to make two key arguments. The first is that feminist geopolitics is a conceptual approach that is perhaps uniquely placed to make sense of COVID geographies. The second is to propose that this account of COVID speaks back to recent debates about the future of feminist geopolitics. Reflecting on recent debates about possible futures for feminist geopolitics, the paper will make the case for a materially-engaged feminist geopolitics which nevertheless keeps the socially-marked body at the heart of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Europe shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, Longyearbyen, the main settlement of Svalbard, was moving from a coal-based economy to one based on science and tourism. The remote location of the Svalbard archipelago in the High Arctic makes it an isolated, secure haven from the chaos worldwide. But this renders its population vulnerable should the virus come since there are neither facilities to care for the sick nor other nearby communities to help in case of need. Svalbard, with its special territorial status, is in a unique geopolitical situation where people are free to come and go. Longyearbyen is an inherently transient space with a highly mobile population. Based on interview narratives of participants' lived experiences in Longyearbyen during the pandemic (both in-person and online), this paper explores how forced and encouraged (im)mobilities impacted their individual life choices during the pandemic. Participants' stories revealed systemic inequalities and vulnerabilities in Longyearbyen that were heightened and exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. By combining minor theory with politics of mobility, this paper aims to add to the discussion within mobilities studies on how the personal, emotional responses to these situations are linked to decisions about mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the role of anniversaries of global events or crises to understand how their practice of memorial storytelling manages and governs cultural narratives of crises in ways that obscure more productive approaches to resistance. Drawing on the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (2022) as a call for new cultural approaches to anniversaries, this paper investigates their productive role in new imaginaries for ethics of cohabitation, interdependency and liveability. Anniversaries of global crises as rituals of interdependency and belonging can, it is argued, be critically understood not as instances of historical rupture but as moments of ontological adjustment. Building on the recent work of Judith Butler, it is suggested that such ontologies centre on the relationship between interdependency, equality of grievability and infrastructural supports for care, all of which must be apprehended from poststructuralist cultural perspectives. If cultural studies is to play an advocacy role towards ethical change, then making sense of how global anniversaries can highlight rather than obscure marginal ethical practices is a starting point for cultural change towards more equitable and liveable global cohabitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the proximity of local media to audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on a case study of Italian daily L'Eco di Bergamo combining two sets of data: a list of initiatives the newspaper took in 2019 and 2020 to be closer to audiences, and interviews shedding light on how staff viewed the paper's relationship with audiences during that time. An analysis of these two datasets shows that the pandemic increased the newspaper's proximity to audiences but did not fundamentally change the way in which it related with audiences, despite significant changes in journalists' work routines. Based on these findings, the paper proposes a conceptualization of proximity as a dynamic balance between three structuring dimensions (gatekeeping, social and commercial), with a focus on audiences as a plural figure determined by news organizations' strategies. [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]

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]

The purpose of this paper is to present a reading of child protection and welfare practice in the recent covid 19 pandemic, with reference to several popular concepts in social work. The focus is on the relevance of these concepts to the contemporary circumstances in which child protection and welfare social workers often now find themselves. The specific intention is to extract learning from four traditionally popular approaches in social work, namely, resilience-building, systems theory, ACES and trauma-informed approaches. This will be achieved by first introducing, and then explaining key ideas and conventions of each approach. Here, relevant and established literature will be referenced to inform explanations. As the utility of the systemic perspective for child protection work is already well established, the paper considers how this perspective can be extended to assist in work with children and young people in the pandemic who have Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). In this paper, exploration of the detail of that extension lies in resilience building and trauma-informed practice. Whilst concepts of trauma-sensitivity and resilience are variously embedded in ACEs literature, their mutual treatment tends to be deficient in one regard. Specifically, these concepts are often not thought about in a systemic manner, necessitating the inclusion of a systemic lens. Overall, the case of child protection and welfare social work offers an important focus by which one might question the relevancy of these approaches to contemporary practice in a global pandemic. In concluding, the paper's core proposition is revisited. Specifically, it is argued that the focal approaches, traditionally popular in social work, remain both instrumental and imperative, for understanding the complexities of child protection and welfare unfolding in a global pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Singapore won early kudos for its 'gold standard' handling of the COVID-19 pandemic back in February 2020. It was praised globally for its ability to activate an effective contact tracing system. Riding on this success, the government introduced 'TraceTogether', a mobile phone app to enhance contact tracing efforts, using a technology that leverages the Bluetooth feature on smartphones to track proximity between users and record their physical encounters. This paper contends that the roll-out of the app is a form of 'technological opportunism' to enhance greater bodily surveillance over its citizens during a time of crisis. The low number of downloads of the app initially (at 20%), before persuasion-coercion strategies were applied to lift the take-up rate to 90%, belies the assumption that surveillance is genuinely widely accepted. This paper details key responses to the app in Singapore, and the government's decision to make it mandatory during the heart of the pandemic between 2020 to 2022. It considers the implications of technological opportunism, taking advantage of a pandemic to continue in the journey of turning citizens into what Michel Foucault would refer to as 'subjectified bodies' to be traced, tracked and codified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses U.S. pandemic-related propaganda, as a mode of administering society, selves, and the COVID-19 virus relevant to other national contexts. The paper examines what I call pandemic revanchism, which, in order to stoke U.S. culture wars, propag(and)ates the COVID-19 epidemic by sensationalizing the trivial and normalizing the extraordinary or absurd. Banal forms of administrative grotesquerie mobilize a community of alt-health (non)sense and tie freedom to a viral and literally infectious resentment and retaliatory collateral mortality. The paper first develops the framework of FOOB ('folklore of operational banality') to scrutinize how ordinary health/medical administration and reactionary power relations alike level sense and non-sense. It then offers a performative analysis that shows human geographies of routinized anti-establishment refusal and conspiratorial organizing related to the pandemic. The FOOB approach refuses to simply admonish pandemic revanchism and, instead, tracks how this form of administration consolidates social terrains and quotidian online activity. The analysis seeks to level criticism in a way that undermines social division. It does so by remaining open to reasonable doubts about biomedicalization that are swept up in alt-health and pandemic-related propaganda, and by foregrounding how policy, affect, and storylines routinize extremisms within the American public terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic explored its likely effects on the tourism sector including the nature of recovery. Viewed through the lens of Evolutionary Economic Geography, this paper examines the preferences of four stakeholder groups for future tourism development in Northern Devon. Specifically, it reports on their views from 2021 and 2022 of three potential scenarios which were elaborated before the pandemic, and it explores whether COVID-19 was a trigger event for a change in trajectory. There was consistent support for the most sustainable trajectory, which represented the continuation of the existing arc of development, not a fundamental change in direction triggered by COVID-19. Not only does this finding contribute a retrospective critique of early opinions on possible COVID-induced change, it suggests an alternative view of the role of trigger events in destination evolution. The pandemic offered space for reflection on tourism development, as a form of 'mindful continuation' of transformation, not a 'mindful deviation' identified in some previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As COVID-19 is an emerging pandemic, analysing its evolution is necessary to understand it in order to find appropriate answers. In this paper, we aim to observe and analyse it at the Chadian-Senegalese level. Thus, we collect public data in order to present via curves, histograms and tables the main characteristics of this pandemic. In this way, we implement a python program to construct these. We focus only on extracting long-term data without predictive models. We observed that there are mainly two waves (outbreak) per year with stable or even decreasing infection and death rates. We also identified moments of growth and relaxation of the disease. These results can be used to identify times when treatment or prevention should be intensified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines generational travel behaviour and intentions of Portuguese tourists before and after the pandemic. The comparisons established a framework to understand what really has changed. The sample includes 490 Portuguese tourists. Our analysis revealed three clusters which are distinct in terms of generation belonging and distance travelled, among other variables. The results suggest that the willingness to travel is higher than previously, working as a kind of revenge to mitigate the isolation times. Strategical implications for practitioners are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape–tourism nexus has been the subject of many scientific contributions that differ in nature and methodological approach. Beyond sectorial planning assessments and impact evaluations, which often fail to grasp this complex relationship, this paper draws on conceptual frameworks in the social sciences and humanities that define the nexus through the productive potential of mobilities, bodily presences and interactions to investigate tourist landscapes in pandemic times. More precisely, the blended concept of dwelling-in-motion is adopted to explore tourist landscapes as evolving constellations of intertwined places and practices of people engaging with empty spaces, redescribing their functions and values and defining new forms of proximity tourism. This study focuses on the Brenta Riviera in northeastern Italy between Padua and Venice—an extremely dense area in terms of landscape stratifications and an exemplary local case where the effects of COVID-19 restrictions have been reshaping physical orderings, social relations and cultural meanings. During the third wave of the pandemic in Italy, a mapping process based on an online survey collected significant georeferenced landscapes among visitors, residents and operators, unveiling multiple and often unexpected Riviera landscapes as expressions of changing attitudes and behaviours towards neighbouring places. Calling for intimate well-being or collective involvement, 'newcomers-on-the-move' have been blurring the lines between daily, recreational and tourist landscapes, leading to a reconsideration of who can be a tourist and what can be a tourist landscape in a (post-)COVID-19 world. From a tourism policy perspective, tracing these trajectories is one of the starting points for rethinking destination recovery and addressing sustainable goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically shifted modes of communication and connection. For many, digital technologies have played critical roles in enabling ongoing relationships during extended periods of social isolation. Yet the modes of connection offered through such technologies have prompted new affective relations and digital intimacies. In this article, we draw upon interviews with 17 women working in the sport and fitness sector in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore their engagement with digital technologies during pandemic times. Each of the women responded to the nationwide lockdown by offering and participating in online fitness classes, using shared movement experiences to cultivate supportive emotional relations for their communities. Drawing upon the theoretical insights of feminist materialisms, this paper contributes to deeper understandings of how digital intimacies produce a reimagining of felt community relations through entanglements of technology, virtual touch and haptic connections. The co-constitution of physical-digital spaces is enacted by women through an ethos of care that is lived through moving bodies together-apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As society emerges from an unprecedented pandemic that saw the closure of libraries, schools, and universities worldwide, the potential lasting impacts on institutions, professions, and communities can begin to be assessed. Through a bibliometric study of COVID-19-related library publishing, combined with thematic coding of article abstracts, this paper provides an initial glimpse into the impacts of the pandemic on library operations, services, collections, and the workforce. Two hundred thirty-seven journal articles published in 2020 about libraries and the pandemic were identified and analyzed. These articles indicate broad cross-sectoral, global impacts on libraries and librarianship. This analysis provides a baseline for future research on the lasting effects of the pandemic on the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While higher education plays a critical role in society, little is known about the motivation of faculty members within such institutions. In this paper, we explore the faculty motivation to voluntarily cocreate an interdisciplinary course as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of our qualitative, phenomenological study highlight sensemaking for both students and faculty, being peer-driven, ability to collaboratively innovate, desire for student engagement, being able to leverage existing expertise, and concern for institutional welfare as motivational drivers for faculty. The shared experience of creating and teaching the course subsequently impacts faculty in a number of different ways. A crisis-based faculty motivation model for interdisciplinary course cocreation is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the effects that mobility restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic have had on different types of co-presence, which the existing literature considers to be central for science and innovation. Drawing on a regional analysis of COVID-19 restrictions in Germany, it links specific mobility restrictions to concrete impacts on co-presence, differentiating between co-presence in organizations, dynamic temporary co-presence, and the local 'buzz'. It highlights that co-presence at workplaces and conferences was resilient to restrictions but that the detrimental effects on the 'local buzz' may have been substantial and long-lasting. In conclusion, it cautions against the severe effects of placing restrictions on the education system. Subsequently, the discussion links the reported disruptions of co-presence to the potential effects of the pandemic on preconditions for innovative processes and economic recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the SBCC training experience in Francophone West Africa and how training programs have been impacted by major pandemics that this region has experienced, COVID-19 particularly. To stay focused, we have selected Côte d'Ivoire as a case study because it is representative of Francophone African countries which faced political instability, pandemics and epidemics in the past two decades. Data were collected through desk review and interviews with key informants. Taking stock of the past to recent experience, both in long-term and academic training, and on-the-job and short-term training on one hand, and examining the influence of COVID-19 crisis on SBCC training in the country and sub-region on the other hand, lessons learned, and challenges ahead are identified. The paper focuses on multidisciplinary, multisectoral and sub-regional responses, e-learning, and professionalizing SBCC, as future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has not only brought about sociocultural, psychological and economic challenges, but also educational problems that have entailed radical policy changes to allow universities and colleges to fulfil their role. Before the pandemic, the majority of university courses were designed for face-to-face settings; but under the social distancing policies since Covid-19, institutions have had to react quickly, revising their teaching and assessment policies to ensure that education continues for all students and accommodate the new remote reality of education. This paper provides a review of the changes in educational assessment and grading policies of universities around the world in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, where five key themes were identified: covid-19 binary grading system, revised regulations governing the final degree award, relaxed academic progression policies, revised extension, deferral and exceptional circumstances policies, and mark adjustments. This review will serve as a useful summary for institutions to reflect upon and inform planning strategies for subsequent unexpected future events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we contribute to the emerging literature on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gender gap in research productivity. We extend previous studies by considering men and women academics from science and non-science disciplines through an analysis of data from academics at 14 universities across two countries (seven in Australia and seven in Canada) and focusing on the role of primary caregiving. Our empirical approach used logistic regressions and the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique. The latter enabled us to ask: 'How much of the gender gap in perceived productivity during the pandemic is due to gender differences in primary care responsibilities?' Within the sample (N = 2,817) of academics, 33% of women and 25% of men reported that their perceived publication ability decreased a lot during the pandemic. This is an eight percentage-point gender gap in perceived publication ability. Statistical analysis revealed that two-fifths (40%) of this gap may be explained by gender differences in having primary responsibility for the care of children. Gender differences in other characteristics such as age, discipline, and increased teaching and administrative work were not, as a group, significant. There were also no differences between Australia and Canada. The findings are important, particularly for the pursuit of gender equality within academia. In the absence of specific mitigating interventions, research disruptions in 2020 may have long-lasting career scarring effects (e.g. hiring, promotion, tenure) and, as a result, see women further disadvantaged within the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of academic geographers got together across borders to share our varied experiences. In this paper we illustrate how this storying of pandemia helped us critically and collaboratively understand, (re)imagine and reconfigure ways of living during a global pandemic. We were especially interested in exploring different forms and practices of collective thinking and academic labour, within and beyond the academy. This paper foregrounds emotions and lived experiences, power and positionality, natures, bodies, and relations, and how they have come to our attention in new, different, or more pronounced ways, through everyday geographies of pandemia. Our aim is to emphasise two important aspects: that pandemia is a state of being with/as/through pandemic, and, as a collective noun, pandemia centres plurality, focusing on the potential to attend to the ways experiences of pandemic are redolent with multiple, overlapping exclusions and belongings, openings and closures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SARS-CoV2 is the latest pandemic that have plagued the socio-health system as an epiphenomenon resulting from planetary resources abuse, crucial for biodiversity. The Anthropocene best defines the present epoch in which human activity irreversibly manipulates intricate and delicate geological and biological balances established over eons. The devastating ecological and socio-economic implications of COVID-19, underline the importance of updating the present pandemic framework to a syndemic. This paper stems from the need to suggest to scientists, doctors, and patients a mission that integrates responsibility from individual to collective health, from present to trans-generational, from human to the entire biotic network. Today's choices are crucial for the perspective on all levels: political, economic, and health as well as cultural. Research on PubMed and other specific web-sites journal was performed on the topic "Microbiota", "Covid-19", "Pandemic", "Zoonosis", "SARS-CoV-2", "Environmental Pollutants", "Epigenetics", "Fetal Programming", "Human Extinction". Data collected were analysed for an integrative model of interconnection between environment, pregnancy, SARS-CoV-2 infection, and microbiota. Moreover, systematic literature review allowed to summarise in a table information about the worst pandemics that afflicted the human species recently. This paper offers a broad view of the current pandemic starting with pregnancy, the moment when a new life begins and the health trajectories of the unborn child are defined, which will inevitably have repercussions on his well-being. The fundamental role of the biodiversity-rich microbiota in avoiding the development of severe infectious diseases, is therefore highlighted. It is imperative to adjust the current reductionist paradigm based on mostly immediate symptom management towards a broader understanding of the spatial interconnection of ecological niches with human health and the impacts of today's choices on the future. Health and healthcare are elitist rather than egalitarian, therefore focusing on environmental health forces us to make a concerted and systemic effort that challenges political and economic barriers, which are biologically senseless. A healthy microbiota is essential to well-being, both by preventing chronic degenerative conditions, the infectiousness and pathogenicity of bacterial and viral diseases. SARS-CoV-2 should not be an exception. The human microbiota, forged by the first 1,000 days of life, is fundamental in shaping the health-disease trajectories, and by the everlasting exposome that is dramatically affected by the ecological disaster. Individual health is one world health whereas single and global well-being are interdependent in a space-time perspective. Is it not a convenient reductionism not to consider the COVID-19 emergency as a bio-social epiphenomenon of a far more devastating and multi-faceted crisis whose common denominator is the global biotic network loss of which humans are still part? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Library began planning for the Fall 2020 semester knowing that COVID-19 and social unrest stemming from police actions across the country would impact library safety for the university community. The goal for reopening was to implement best practices that incorporated University health and safety guidelines as well as student feedback. A task force conducted 12 focus group sessions between June 18–26, 2020, in which 56 university students participated. Students identified physical distancing, personal protective equipment (PPE), and monitoring compliance in the library as primary concerns. The campus libraries made extensive changes to its facilities, access to materials and services, and conduct policies to address these issues. This paper will benefit library leaders and administrators making tough and unprecedented time-sensitive decisions using evidence-based data from stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws upon photography as an active intervention into compromised environments and uses it to discover and develop new perspectives on past and future histories of education after COVID-19. These perspectives become particularly clear when seen against the backdrop of recent discussions on planetary responsibility and shared ecologies. The paper suggests that we shift our research agendas away from anthropocentric world views that have placed great emphasis on human sovereignty, modernisation, progress and/or decline, nation states and global governance, and the stratifying effects of education systems, without reflecting their ecological consequences. It argues that anthropocentric approaches to history of education have neglected the openness and vulnerability of the human body and its ethical, cultural and social proximity to other living creatures and the material world. The paper therefore focuses on what it means for historians of education to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, what it means to change research perspectives, and what it means to look at photographs that were produced in a state of exception. The paper sets out to propose a manifesto for a post-anthropocentric research agenda that anchors history of education and the history of pandemics in intertwined ecologies of the living and material worlds. The paper suggests that future histories of education cannot be written without considering the COVID-19 crisis as both a challenge and an encouragement to further develop our understanding of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on five of the world's most liquid futures markets. The results of our wavelet coherence analysis for spot futures reveal two important findings. First, spot futures coherence movements during the pandemic period are influential at both low and high frequency scales. Second, the spectrogram shows mixed causality directions at all scales of observation in the period before and during the pandemic. In terms of hedging effectiveness, OLS and VECM show improvements in hedging effectiveness. Nevertheless, multiscale analysis with wavelet methods shows that hedging effectiveness depends on the hedge period due to the instability of the spot-futures association during the pandemic period. Our results refute the conventional wisdom among finance scholars that a stronger link between spot and futures markets during the crisis improves hedging effectiveness. We would emphasise that investment baskets and hedge pairs should be reviewed frequently to optimise results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much knowledge is being generated on the impact of the pandemic, we still know very little on its implications on taxation in lower-income countries. Yet, tax is crucial to fund crisis response and recovery, in addition to broader development plans and expanded government expenditure. This paper starts addressing this gap using an unique dataset of survey data from Rwanda. We document two significant shifts in taxpayers' views during the pandemic: perceptions about the fairness of the tax system improve by 40 per cent, and their attitudes to compliance become more conditional on the provision of public services of sufficiently good quality. We put these results in the broader context of crisis response. We show that they are not simply linked to individual experiences of the crisis or access to relief, but they are more likely linked to generalised improvements in solidarity and patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws attention to the current and possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the (im)mobility trajectories of international students (IS) and the global higher education landscape. From the perspective of migration infrastructure, this paper specifically focuses on the immobility experiences amongst Chinese international students (CIS) who planned to enrol overseas in 2020 but instead chose to take online courses in China due to the COVID-19. It asks how online courses are both facilitated and constrained by a set of institutional and technological infrastructural forces. Particularly it also explores how some CIS exercise agency to mobilise their infrastructural surroundings and overcome certain infrastructural deficiencies they encounter, with the aim of improving studying/living quality while inhabiting immobilities in a transnational context. As such, this paper challenges the oppositional nature of mobility and immobility, arguing that immobility is not the 'flip side' to mobility or an outcome by default, and that being immobile can be affirming and empowering. Essentially, the paper brings this infrastructurally sensitive theoretical approach into international student mobility (ISM) studies, shifting the focus from examining how infrastructures move people to how they enable people to stay, and to how they are lived and reconstructed at an everyday level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores research findings regarding the possibilities offered by remote attendance at council meetings as implemented during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, and reflects upon how this may improve women local councillors' experiences, as well as women's political participation and the accessibility of Welsh local government going forward. Influenced by feminist institutionalist theory, this paper examines how councils' formal organisational norms and practices pre-pandemic privileged presenteeism, and explores participants' perceptions and experiences of the accessibility of local councils, especially for younger women with families and/or in other forms of employment. Presenting data from 19 semi-structured interviews with women local councillors in Wales (UK), both in-person and subsequently online during the pandemic, the paper discusses how remote attendance in local council meetings was considered an enabling shift in formal organisational practices, especially for rural councils. Despite some dissenting opinions and voiced dubiousness (mostly concerning future hybrid implementation), through easing the time costs of being a local councillor, particularly for women balancing a gendered 'triple duty' of the political, personal, and professional, remote meeting attendance is an organisational solution, albeit somewhat forced in implementation, which presents clear means of improving women's political participation and representation in local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rampant COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe rapidly in 2020, causing a tremendous impact on human health and the global economy. This pandemic has stimulated an explosive increase of related studies in various disciplines, including geography, which has contributed to pandemic mitigation with a unique spatiotemporal perspective. Reviewing relevant research has implications for understanding the contribution of geography to COVID-19 research. The sheer volume of publications, however, makes the review work more challenging. Here we use the support vector machine and term frequency-inverse document frequency algorithm to identify geographical studies and bibliometrics to discover primary research themes, accelerating the systematic review of COVID-19 geographical research. We confirmed 1,171 geographical papers about COVID-19 published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, of which a large proportion are in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS) and human geography. We identified four main research themes—the spread of the pandemic, social management, public behavior, and impacts of the pandemic—embodying the contribution of geography. Our findings show the feasibility of machine learning methods in reviewing large-scale literature and highlight the value of geography in the fight against COVID-19. This review could provide references for decision makers to formulate policies combined with spatial thinking and for scholars to find future research directions in which they can strengthen collaboration with geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has intensively damaged human socio-economic lives and the growth of countries around the world. Many efforts have been made in the direction of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to detect the corona at an early stage and take necessary precautions to stop it from spreading or recovery from the infection. However, the situation and solutions are still challenging. In this paper, we proposed various technological aspects, solutions using a supervised/unsupervised manner and continuous health monitoring with physiological parameters. Finally, the performance of COVID-19 detection with Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM) technique using the voice signal has been demonstrated. The developed system achieves the COVID-19 detection performance in terms of areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves in the range 60–67%. Moreover, the various lessons learned from the current COVID-19 crisis are presented for future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this analysis, we examine the relationship between the effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) at the state level in India and the initial policy responses among Indian state governments to the COVID-19 pandemic between January and April 2020. We find that by April 2020, Indian states with a relatively lower ENPP adopted more stringent measures to address the spread of the pandemic while states with a higher ENPP adopted less stringent measures. We hypothesize that it may have been more difficult for states with a larger number of parties to quickly adopt mitigation measures early in the pandemic, while it may have been relatively easier for states with a smaller number of parties. We discuss avenues for future research given the findings and the data presented in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foodservice firms have been among the most affected business units during the COVID-19 pandemic. The slew of lockdowns and resulting apprehensions of contracting virus infections have largely deterred customers from patronizing various food outlets. However, with internet assistance consumers have increasingly found perceived refuge from unsafe dining experiences. As a result, the paper makes attempt to identify the determinants of customers' dining experience in restaurants. A total of 1,545 customer reviews from 97 foodservice outlets of 14 Indian cities were collected. R programming was used to perform qualitative analysis on the reviews to identify the features. Bigram analysis was applied to calculate the repeated phrases. Based on the repeated phrases, researchers measured the factors that contribute toward the customers' dining experience. The findings suggest that food quality and taste, food variety, staff behavior, restaurant ambience, along with social distance and safety norms mainly determine guest satisfaction. The findings also reveal that hotels need to apply recovery strategies such as training staff to adapt to the new-normal strategies and provide a safe environment to improve restaurant businesses. This study uses novel dataset and the findings essentially contribute to the food service literature. Further study can be done using big data in varied settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding people's concepts of illness and health is key to crafting policies and communications campaigns to address a particular medical concern. This paper gathers cultural knowledge on infectious disease causation, prevention, and treatment the Philippines that are particularly relevant for the COVID-19 pandemic, and analyzes their implications for public health. This paper draws from ethnographic work (e.g. participant observation, interviews, conversations, virtual ethnography) carried out individually by each of the two authors from February to September 2020. The data was analyzed in relation to the anthropological literature on local health knowledge in the Philippines. We find that notions of hawa (contagion) and resistensiya (immunity) inform people's views of illness causation as well as their preventive practices - including the use of face masks and 'vitamins' and other pharmaceuticals, as well as the ways in which they negotiate prescriptions of face mask use and physical distancing. These perceptions and practices go beyond biomedical knowledge and are continuously being shaped by people's everyday experiences and circulations of knowledge in traditional and social media. Our study reveals that people's novel practices reflect recurrent, familiar, and long-held concepts - such as the moral undertones of hawa and experimentation inherent in resistensiya. Policies and communications efforts should acknowledge and anticipate how these notions may serve as either barriers or facilitators to participatory care and improved health outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on an autoethnographic 'digital diary' which the author began after testing positive for HIV in July 2016, until May 2021, to critically assess (mis)representations of both the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics in the media. Drawing on insights from art, literature, queer theory and social anthropology, the paper focuses on dominant moral and political discourses to show how narratives of blame, shame and guilt about viral transmission contribute to the stigmatisation of 'at risk' groups. Concepts of biopower and normative judgement are used to reflect on discourses which construct those who 'test positive' for HIV or SARS-CoV-2 as 'reckless', 'risky' or 'irresponsible' subjects. The paper also analyses notes on recent media appearances made by the author to discuss their participation in the PARTNER study, which showed that HIV antiretroviral therapy eliminates the possibility of HIV transmission, including reports in The Guardian, on BBC News, on Sky News, on Channel 5 News, and in the Metro. As the former had reported that the 'Covid-19 crisis raises hopes of end to UK transmission of HIV', portrayals of the two pandemics are compared to explore tensions between public health and individual responsibility as normative priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How distancing requirements in the COVID-19 pandemic transformed intimate relationships is under-researched. Against the backdrop of research on the HIV pandemic, the paper departs from the assumption that decreased legitimacy of intimate arrangements and subjective worry about the likeliness of infection may reduce the frequency of multiple sexual contact and intimate well-being during the pandemic. Based on findings from a quantitative study which included measures of risk perception, frequency of contact with sexual partners and communities, concealment, as well as relationship quality in Austria and Germany, this paper examines sexual behaviour in association with relationship status and sexual identity. Analysing data from a convenience sample of 4,709 respondents, of whom 24 per cent identified as LGBQA+, 2 per cent as non-binary, and 6 per cent as consensually non-monogamous, bivariate analysis found significant differences in social distancing, frequency of contact with sexual communities and satisfaction with current sex life. Text analysis of the survey's open-ended responses indicates monogamisation due to declined legitimacy of less conventional intimate arrangements during the pandemic. Findings point to the importance of the sexual morality that defined pandemic experiences in times of HIV for understanding normative pressure on intimate life during COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As threats to human security, epidemics cause fear and anxiety, thus generating conspiracy theories, fake news, and discrimination. In 2020, the most widespread xenophobic reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic was Sinophobia. In comparison, India's response to the pandemic was both conventional and exceptional. Like other countries, India recorded a surge in Sinophobia; but –remarkably– in Islamophobia too. Turning to both history and theory, this paper investigates how Coronavirus got transformed into a 'Muslim disease' and connected to narratives of holy war and Islamization ('Corona Jihad'). We contextualize the 2020 Covid-related Islamophobic wave within a longer process of demonization of the Muslim that is catalysed by the beliefs and policies of Hindu nationalism. In light of Muslims' continuing relegation to the fringe of the Indian body-politic, we propose an interpretation of the 2020 disease-induced Islamophobia as scapegoating, based on René Girard's mimetic theory. In conclusion, the case of Covid-19 in India confirms that in divided societies collective threats like epidemics are likely to exacerbate already existing forms of discrimination rooted in the society's mainstream memory and norms, and highlights the role of beliefs in mediating between threat and violence. This case study also highlights the deep penetration of communal discourse in India's everydayness and its far-reaching implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I describe how my painting practice restored and sustained a more coherent and vitalized sense of self during the isolation, loneliness and sense of unrealness, dislocation, and lost world order brought about by Covid. I describe how the intersubjective and physical process of painting, and the nonverbal, embodied experience of creating art re-situated me in a world that felt real and allowed me to know and reflect on emotional experiences not available verbally until represented in visual, concrete form. I present a brief clinical example to illustrate how my artistic practice during Covid decisively informed an appreciation of the importance of a co-constructed selfobject experience that recognized how essential a patient's own affirmed creativity was for enhancing her sense of vitality, agency, and possibility of positive change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disasters are a primary influence in the global development landscape given their unequal impacts across society and calls for transformative change in their aftermath. Recovering from disasters is one component of development that is coming under scrutiny. This is especially so in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, whose scale, scope, and cascading effects mean that the uncertain prospects for recovery will be complicated and endure long term. COVID-19 has forced a reappraisal of what recovery encompasses, who it is for, and how it can better enable preparedness for future disasters. Drawing upon interviews with a global community of experts specializing in different areas of disaster governance, this paper focuses on the lessons emerging for recovery-related theory and practice deriving from the pandemic. We elaborate a multi-dimensional framework to support those working on local recovery planning within communities and operating across different sectors. The framework captures the interconnected issues across six principal domains—communities, economic, infrastructure, environment, health, and governance—representing key impact areas around which strategies and multifaceted actions can be developed. We suggest a three-step process using a systems approach to develop a recovery strategy that operationalizes the framework and addresses the complexity of long-term recovery for development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways we experience and construct our homes help us know and define who we are. The digital age and the immense presence of social media in people's lives have led to the redefining and, some argue, erasures of the boundaries between 'private' and 'public' spheres. Recently, with wide-scale lockdowns and the mass movement of workspaces to homes in response to COVID-19, these boundaries have been altered particularly radically and universally. This paper explores the changing role and function of the home as more than simply a house – or a physical, concrete space – but as multiple, fluid and sometimes intangible spaces. Analysing Australian digital audio fiction series The Fitzroy Diaries, it investigates how individuals negotiate structures of power in these spaces during COVID-19 to create a sense of home but also a sense of self. A close textual analysis illustrates the ways that those living through the pandemic witness and negotiate on the one hand the shrinking of their internal worlds, but on the other hand the opening up of these into 'outside' realms, and how individuals are positioned in relation to these changing spaces of home according to their access to power and privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]