ABSTRACT
Introduction. This article discusses some anthropological and sociological slight reflections about the uses and the abuses of the political exceptionality in the Covid-19 pandemic. The relevance is connected with questions about the "New Norm", permeated with the daily destructiveness of antisocial metabolic practices of an even more predatory capitalism, whose social control cannot regulate violent neoliberal extraction in a mode of accumulation. Aim and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study the gradual resumption of interrupted social activities as a policy measure to combat the New Coronavirus Pandemic is placed from the perspective of its economic and ecologic rationalities as well as from the perspective of the new moral, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral demands directed to the common social actor and agent of big and small cities. Results. The article substantiates the context of the so-called "new norm", permeated by the daily destructiveness of antisocial metabolic practices of even more predatory capitalism in a violent neoliberal form. Therefore, due to this discrepancy between legality and legitimacy, the level of authoritarianism and further growth of inequality and indifference among people increases. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a mismatch between legality and legitimacy, as well as the legitimization of the interests of individual actors in the market as opposed to the adoption of legislation and for pro-capital interests. The principles of legitimacy were limited by bureaucratic rationality and the genocidal legalism of neoliberal politics. Conclusions. The pandemic has disrupted economies, has mainly punished the poorest and most underserved and has destabilized governments of various ideological nuances. Participants at all levels of the economy will suffer the most severe and immediate consequences of all losses. This is the controversial logic of capital and one of its main contradictions is revealed.
ABSTRACT
In the present essay review, we bring some sociological reflections about the durable effects of the lockdown not only in tourism behaviour but also in society. In so doing, we pose some central questions oriented to understand the sense of new normality, where the social distancing marks human relations. We coin the term trivialisation of death to discuss the ideological dispositions revolving around the domestication of death. In parallel, a new debate around the idea of the tourist-gaze is amounted in the section to follow. In the pre-pandemic world, tourists were valorised as ambassadors of the civilised order, but now they appear to be demonised as potential carriers of a lethal decease, if not potential terrorists who lurk to attack anytime. To some extent, COVID19 -far from being a foundational event- reaffirms a logic that starts with 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about several changes to doctoral programs due to the prohibition of face-to-face activities. This situation has generated many difficulties but has also facilitated research activities in Sociology in Brazil and Portugal. This essay discusses the changes introduced in sociological research and the main strategy found to overcome the difficulties – remote work – with the aim of raising questions for a research agenda on the subject. The notes and analyses presented here are produced from participant observation and full participation as an academic linked to three universities, where I had access to remote work data and operational notes issued by these universities during the pandemic. In these observations, I have identified that the professors, technicians and researchers pay the bill for remote work in the doctorate programs, and that the pandemic affects researchers unequally, depending on their gender, the stage of the course they are in, whether the academic relationship is national or foreign, whether they receive a scholarship or not, and whether they are at home or on student mobility. © 2020 by the author.