Readings & Audiovisual

Vaccines are in the news every day as some countries struggle to improve vaccination rates and others struggle to access vaccines. A social science approach is needed to further explore what actions can be taken to optimize vaccine acceptance during a disease outbreak, with immediate lessons for the COVID-19 pandemic. Social science can highlight histories of oppression, political-economic contexts that exacerbate inequality, and how communities experience injustice with implications for how individuals view, trust, and take up vaccines. In this Epicast, we explore social science perspectives on vaccine deployment through the lens of Project AViD: Anthropological Exploration of Facilitators and Barriers to Vaccine Deployment and Administration During Disease Outbreaks.

In January 2021, the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “we now face the real danger that even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” and that “the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of this.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been unprecedented for the amount of data which is produced daily about the disease and for controversies over evidence, predictions and ‘misinformation’.

How do we socially and culturally adapt to isolation? How do we experience empty spaces? Are new forms of solidarity emerging? How does it feel to have to work in hospitals, assembly lines or shops when others stay at home? What new questions are we asking ourselves about our parenting and being a child? What new forms of exploitation emerge from the increased digitalisation of work? What new spaces of freedom have emerged? How can we understand social media’s role in the pandemic? How are our modes of communication changing in general? What role does humour play in our new shared experience of an absurd situation without precedent? Seven diarists offer us a short audio diary once a week throughout the month of April, reflecting, describing, venting – all is permissible, all has to be expected.

This special Sonar-Global Epicast about antimicrobial resistance is a follow-up on the Sonar-Global Special-SOC AMR curriculum development meeting held in October 2019 in Amsterdam.

Epicast is a podcast series about epidemics from Sonar-Global. The aim of this podcast is to explore the social dimensions of infectious diseases outbreaks so that we can get better at controlling them. For this first episode, we will be focusing on the Coronavirus outbreak.

My name is Maria Doria, I am a psychologist based currently in Uruguay. We are living a serious and sad moment, with a strong human, social and economic impact. Clearly, this global pandemic revealed that the world was not prepared on many levels for an event of this magnitude.

The World Health Organisation has warned that lifting lockdowns too soon could spark a dangerous resurgence of the disease. We hear how the progress made globally could be squandered if societies reopen too soon, and about the need for global cooperation.

Hallo, my name is Roberta Raffaetà and I am an anthropologist working at the Free Uni of Bolzano in Italy. I would like to share with you some thoughts I am having in these days about coronavirus by witnessing what is happening here in Italy and also inspired by my current research on how scientists produce knowledge about microbes.

I think the gut reaction of many Hong Kong was that "oh no, it is SARS again", probably because the memory from when the disease plagued Hong Kong 17 years ago is quite vivid and painful for many of us. But the side effect of that is that people reacted quickly to see the virus from Wuhan by saying you should wear a mask in public whilst government officials were seen on TV not wearing a mask. Other knowledge such as cleaning a home with bleach solution, maintaining good hand hygiene are also from 17 years ago and people are putting this knowledge to good use. Anot

The outbreak of the new coronavirus in Wuhan and the spread of the epidemic across China have led to the adoption of community containment measures, such as quarantine and the lock-down of cities numbering millions of people. To understand what is happening in China, we need to place epidemic control measures in their proper historical context.