Doorways to the deathlands: The imaginal seeing of story

This chapter explore the places where therapist and client need to attend the witchy wise woman's lessons, by coming inside, moving beyond words, making good use of time and being ready to work in the currency of a 'magical logos' that is beyond what is known or fully understood. It will look at how story offers a doorway, through which one see into the silenced and paralyzed places one enters when mortality interrupts life, and dis-locate into the unvisited, imaginative realm called 'The Deathlands'. The chapter will be in a story form that starts by giving a context for story and ritual being vital soul-wise portals which guide during any process of death. It introduces the metaphor of a country, The Deathlands made up of four shires, each with an entry point or doorway through which people pass when they lose someone or become terminally ill. It looks at the kind of story that is played out in these days of Coronavirus, happening during the writing of this chapter. A traditional story will follow each description of The Deathland shires, intended to amplify imaginary, created story, with time-tested, magical wisdom of an ancient myth from tradition of different world cultures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

‘I've left enough data': Relations between people and data and the production of surveillance

Exploring emergent relations between data-producing individuals and their data products, this study aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion on agencies in data practices. It focuses on shifts in surveillance structure in the era of Big Data, in which the individual becomes both a subject and an object in the production of data surveillance. Drawing on the concept of the ‘dividual', the study analyses data practices for a tracing system invented by the South Korean government during the COVID-19 pandemic, with findings from field research conducted with 11 research participants in various urban sites in Seoul. Highlighting how the tracing system positioned surveillance ‘in the hands of citizens', the study exposes the complexities of the relations that the participants formed with the data they produced, and how they reflexively reappropriated their practices through alterations and deflections on the basis of their tacit knowledge and imaginaries concerning digital data and their constituent positions in the knowledge production system. The resultant expression of surveillance was directly shaped by the evolving relationship between the producers (participants) and products (digital data). The study proposes that an intersectional focus on surveillance and critical data studies, with close attention to ordinary people's relations with data, has the capacity to inquire into the politics of data more fully. © The Author(s) 2023.

Spanish Flu times: the 1918 pandemic and the case of Porto Alegre

How to define 1918 pandemic times, that interrupted the rhythm of the beginning of the 20 century and introduced the death temporality? Maybe it was an intermission in the radical notion of progress – a real myth in the Western Culture of that time. For three months the calendar, almost stopped to move. This was the death time, in a society that was not prepared to deal with it. The present time that prevents to think about the past and the future. The waiting time, the doubt time, the trauma time that are frequently silenced, but also the learning experience time. This article intends, therefore, to explore the pandemic temporality as a social marker, and to stablish parallels with the contemporary context of Covid 19. Porto Alegre appears as a case study. (This article was originally a talk to the Anthropology Department of UFRGS, that is why it keeps an essay genre.) © This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Epidemics and the Imaginary of the Sinful City

Epidemics have always had a very close link with cities, represented as the place characterized by differences, exchanges and contaminations. The cause of this urban connotation of epidemics, however, is the result not only of physical and urban features of the cities but also of their cultural traits and of their symbolic representation, their being always imagined as the place of licentious mores, of perdition and sin. Today, in the years of the pandemic by Covid-19, again, the precautions suggested by science are accompanied by those related to the need to keep a respectful behaviour of religious dictates to be able to rely on divine benevolence. Within the process of pluralization which characterizes postmodernity, alongside heuristic models based on models of scientific rationality, others attributable to criteria and categories linked to religion have found some space. Sometimes attributable to a specific religious belief, others to a more general religiosity that often disregards a more structured feeling of belonging towards a subjective spirituality. Also the research whose results are being discussed, has revealed a profound religiosity differentiated in form and intensity, and has showed how much the process of rationalization is related to the one of `re-enchantment' of the world.

<< Our science is a science of the dead world >> The pandemic as a cultural apocalypse and the hypothesis of science as religion

In the public debate around the pandemic, there are positions that have sustained how contemporary techno-science has assumed cultural meanings and operating methods proper to a religion. This thesis, amended by the political implications and critical of the management of the socio-health emergency, is here taken as a research hypothesis whose preconditions are intended to be verified. In other words: are empirical evidences identifiable within the technoscientific field, and not only therefore in the public communication of science, which can be used as a premise for the hypothesized outcome? At the basis of the hypothesis of science as religion there is a fact the idea, detectable in scientific publications, that the pandemic constituted a fatal threat to the human species, a real apocalypse. From the examples analysed, this idea refers to a long-lasting cultural theme - the cultural apocalypse - whose social meaning goes beyond a mere rhetorical and argumentative function to act as a shared horizon of meaning and symbolism on the basis of which to interpret reality, orient decisions and take action. This fact seems to call into question the process of secularization and << disenchantment of the world >> by showing a translation into the technoscientific field of reasons and elements of religious traditions, such as the idea of << the end of the world >> and the << expectation of salvation >>, both in its internal functioning and in its social perception. If the hypothesis is verified in the premises, it follows that technoscience, by reason of the collectively recognized authority, has legitimized and fed a public discursive order crossed by irrationalistic currents, feelings of fear, promises of universal salvation through pharmacological discoveries endowed with miraculous powers and prefiguration of epochal palingenesis with the announcement of a global << new normal >> in the name of a due << faith in science >>.

Cultural Image of Older People during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made evident the exclusion to which older people may be subjected for reasons of age. This study delves into the cultural image of older adults during the pandemic from the perspective of people between 60 and 81 years of age. Through a qualitative methodology, the voices of 37 people have been collected through in-depth interviews. Two main themes are derived from the inductive analysis: on the one hand, the devaluation of older people, and on the other hand, the positive image of the older population as older and valid. We conclude that people over 60 years of age in the Basque Country denounce the stigma of low capacity attributed to the older population during the pandemic. They reject the signs of age-based overprotection manifested during the pandemic and highlight the vital experience by which older people could be considered referents in situations of social crisis. They reflect on the initiatives necessary to improve the cultural image of the older population and point out the opportunities for active ageing, education based on values and intergenerational relationships.

Prolegomena to containment tourism. Happy and smart self-deconfinement sheet or " links to free oneself"

The anthropocene at the time of confinement feeds on stories and fictions. Literary, scientific, ideological, common sense, the anthropocene arouses and generates a world of representations of the world. With the support of this duplication resulting from the imaginary in reality from Plato, man is the being of representation: of the interiorization of external reality, of the exteriorization of interior reality. The imagination is the fuel that nourishes our reflection on the world and the form that thought takes. We can therefore use all forms: concepts (science), notions (common sense), and works (art). Covid 19 has given rise in less than a year to a catalog of complex stories, more or less concerted or disconcerting, which is part of a possible new axis of reading of the imaginary universe. This narrative of confinement (tales, fables, legends, mythologies, medical, health, scientific, political, conspiratorial, literary fictions) borrows from what Terry Pratchett (2006) calls the narrativium : the story which constitutes the basis of the human relationship with the world in all its forms: cognitive, affective, oral, gestural, written, behavioral, reflective, active, creative - the imaginary. The author invites reader to read this narrative catalog at the stage of our current planetary confinement, one unprecedented even in the history of the anthropocene, between apocalypses and millenarisms, resignations, the risk of totalitarianism, calls for a paradigm change or the refoundation of the World, between fake news and suggestions of a new spirituality.

Enhancing Spatial Imaginaries of Metropolitan Renaissance: A Regional Design Approach

This paper explores the contribution of Regional Design (RD), as an imaginative and creative practice aimed at the co-production of actual and future visions, to the construction and diffusion of spatial imaginaries (SI) concerning the present and future of our metropolitan cities. Despite recent studies on the performance of RD, an in-depth understanding of the interrelations between RD and SI has not yet been achieved. In order to fill this gap, the performance of RD in enhancing spatial imaginaries is approached by analysing its capacity to make the region visible, providing moments of insight and institutionalising certain imageries through processes of SI resonance. The application of these notions to the case of the Metropolitan City of Florence, by tracing the evolution of multiple spatial imaginaries and the challenges brought by the pandemic, reveals the opportunities and weaknesses of RD for grasping and even changing spatial imaginaries within processes of defining shared visions for the future of cities and regions.

Covid Photo Diaries Activism in the visual communication of the Covid-19 pandemic

We analyzed the Covid Photo Diaries’s photographs taken during the pandemic to show their disagreement with the photographs of the media. Thus, we recognize two places for photographic production, the official one and Covid Photo Diaries’s, as an activist, for their contribution to the expansion of social representations of the disease from a socio-affective perspective omitted by the global official discourse. This photographs invite us to go beyond the stigmatizing stereotypes of the disease and manage to destabilize the dominant imagery disseminated by the media, to favor the construction of an affective discourse that includes the different human experiences. © Global Knowledge Academics, authors. All rights reserved.

Imaginary and photojournalism in Gaúchazh: how the relationship of individuals with spaces changes in the pandemic context

The pandemic of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, is a topic that has been intensely influenced the media today. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze the photo report “The impact of coronavirus in the routine of RS”, published in GaúchaZH, in order to understand, through the Brazilian press, how the symbolic relationship between individuals and spaces takes place in pandemic times and social isolation. We conducted an exploratory research, using an observational method (GIL, 2008). For analysis purposes, we initially did not look at the portal's historical perspectives and, after, an analysis of the progress of isolation was made through five selected photographs of the publication in question. We take as a basis for reflections the theory of the imaginary © 2021. Discursos Fotograficos.All Rights Reserved.

Storytelling nights: Performing (post)memory of Cape Verdean migration to Rotterdam

The Cape Verdean community in Rotterdam (the third biggest Cape Verdean diaspora in the world) have left a clear imprint on Rotterdam’s culture especially in terms of music production. Recently, this cultural and historical legacy has been gaining more recognition. In the field of performing arts, which constitute a relevant aspect of the urban nightlife (when not impacted by the current COVID-19 restrictions), the stories of migration circulating among the community have inspired Dutch-Cape Verdean artists to create thought-provoking plays on diasporic identity negotiations and belonging. In this regard, two theatre storytelling pieces by second-generation Dutch-Cape Verdean female artists, Lena Évora’s Muziek en Verhalen uit Mijn Geboorteland (‘Music and stories from my homeland’) (2018) and Sonya Dias’s Het Verhaal van Mijn Moeder (‘The story of my mother’) (2017), engage with the notions of ‘home’ and ‘story’ in a particularly thought-provoking way, especially in what concerns night aesthetics. By close reading these two plays within the framework of Diaspora and Critical Archival Studies, this article aims to address how arts play a role in creating imaginary records of Cape Verdean migration history and contribute towards a more inclusive recognition of Rotterdam’s multicultural social texture and its nightlife.

The art of COVID-19

This article examines one strand of COVID art that encodes a heteroclitic cultural imaginary–and is irregular and unsettling. Banksy’s murals and paintings parody classical artworks, and are themselves parodied, so as to capture the new cultural realities of the COVID era. In the case of other artists, such as Chiara Grilli, the traditional heliotrope is parodied to convey a similar reality, like Banksy’s inversion of the superhero mythology. With the employment of conventional disease-vector images, such as those of rats, Banksy brings into the human 5dwelling a “postnatural wilderness” showing the reversal of the disruption of ecosystems that had rendered animals habitat-less in India, with animals once again entering human spaces. Hence, the pandemic’s inversion of spatialized distribution of life can be seen as a decolonial and decolonizing moment. Subsequently, the article highlights how COVID-19 art intervenes through its parodic, kitschy quality, in the discourses around the pandemic. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Triadic Dimensionalities: Knowledge, Movement, and Cultural Discourse-in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

Since early 2020, the Covid-19 (CoronaVIrus Disease-19) pandemic has affected our world in multiple ways. What we know and how we know it has shifted on a global scale. How we move throughout the world has been restricted and locked down. How we see one another has changed the cultural narrative in numerous countries throughout the world. As we seek to rid ourselves of the novel coronavirus infecting our everyday, three significant paradigm shifts have mutated our realities and imaginaries in which we dwell. With millions dead or sickened by the evolving Covid-19 virus (According to the World Health Organization, "Globally, as of 8:32 pm CET, 9 February 2022, there have been 399,600,607 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,757,562 deaths, reported to WHO. As of 7 February 2022, a total of 10,095,615,243 vaccine doses have been administered." Source: https://covid19.who.int; Accessed Feb 9, 2022.), we are a different world now than we were. As guest editors for this Special Issue, (In)Visible Mutations of the (Mis)Information Imaginary: Knowledge, Movement, and Cultural Discourse in the Wake of Covid-19, we pay tribute to the millions affected by these changes by offering this collection of scholarship as a critical path forward. We examine three primary areas in which life, law, and legality have mutated with results that demand our immediate attention. The first section of contributing articles, Knowledge, engages with the dissemination of knowledge and (mis)information as either fact or fiction in lexicons and media outlets throughout the world. The second section, Movement, focuses on aspects of motion and its restriction in terms of bodies, legislation, access, and the threat of viral contamination across borders and within communities. The third section, Cultural Discourse, considers the (in)visibility of viral spread ranging from masks that cover the face to the separation of bodies through social distancing to the politicization of religion and vaccination. What once were normative cultural positionalities of space and politics have been volatized by institutionalized risk reduction and the confrontation of the unknown in the tenuous unforeseeable realm we now globally inhabit: L'idée se fait jour qu'il s'agit au moins autant d'une syndémie que d'une pandémie. Alors que la pandémie est une épidémie qui touche une partie importante de la population mondiale, une syndémie caractérise un entrelacement de maladie, de facteurs biologiques et environnementaux qui, par leur synergie, aggravent les conséquences de ces maladies sur la population. Ost F (De quoi le Covid est-il le nom ? Académie Royale de Belgique, Bruxelles, 2021, p. 6). We hope that this Special Issue helps to contribute as a vital source of critical engagement with the effects of the new pandemic lexicon and re-emerging, yet irrevocably mutated public and private spaces and relationships to each another.

Imagine there's no university: sustaining academic identifications in pandemic times

Through an autoethnographic exercise, this article reflects on the destabilisations that the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked for academic identifications. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Ernesto Laclau's theory, the pandemic is conceptualised as an 'imaginary dislocation'. This analytical device is deployed to examine the author's scenes of reading and writing during the first year of his PhD in the UK. By conceptualising the pandemic as an imaginary dislocation, the interpretation focuses on the unconscious content repressed in both scenes as an indicator of the struggles to endure in his academic identity vis-a-vis the erosion of his imaginary of the university. In order to capture this messy, elusive content, the interpretation relies on the idea of the tremor. Emerging incessantly in the author's readings during the pandemic, the tremor is explored here as a trope staging, in unison, unconscious encounters, a trait of the author's identity and a metaphor of the pandemic. Therefore, by both advancing a conceptual proposal and interpreting an empirical case, the article seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the pandemic has affected the imaginary frameworks within which our symbolic identifications find stability.

Antarctic representation in print media during the emergence of COVID-19

Like every other continent in the world, Antarctica has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, in an imagined as well as a practical sense. Antarctica is a mediated experience;that is, most of us experience the place through films, novels, music, visual arts and the media. We present an analysis of media articles from eight countries over three time periods - pre-COVID-19 outbreak (October-December 2019), shortly after the pandemic hit the headlines (March-May 2020) and when the virus was established (October-December 2020) - to discover how COVID-19 may have changed Antarctic discourse. Our study shows that representations of Antarctica have been affected by the pandemic, in some instances reinforcing existing ideas and in other cases bringing new ideas to the fore. Based on our findings, we believe that COVID-19 has begun to change representations of Antarctica, stepping us away from the prevailing Antarctic hero narrative and providing a more contemporary understanding of the Antarctic experience. We argue that this may increase our motivation to engage with Antarctic issues, with associated implications for future global stewardship of the region.

"Have You Ever Seen Zelensky Without a Haircut?" Quarantine in Ukraine: The State and the People

An anthropological study of the state requires an understanding of everyday practices in human-state interaction. This study, which came about when state-imposed pandemic restrictions required that citizens go into quarantine, draws primarily from auto-ethnography. The conditions under a quarantine brought an end to well-established social practices, presenting a unique opportunity to study them. We explore the ways in which citizens construct the state, looking at citizens working in different institutions and attempting to access various services. This is done by evaluating the quarantine measures implemented by the state in an attempt to understand them. © 2021 University of Toronto. All rights reserved.

TELEVISION NARRATIVES INA CRISIS CONTEXT. COVID-19 IN SPANISH TELEVISION FICTION SERIES

This article analyzes the representation of the COVID-19 crisis made by the Spanish television fiction series which were relayed and produced during the crisis: Jo tambe em quedo a casa (TV3, 2020);Diarios de la cuarentena (TVE, 2020);En casa (HBO, 2020);Relatos con-fin-a-2 (Amazon Prime Video, 2020) and Cuentame (TVE, 2021). This article study, from a cualitative methodology, the production context in the pandemic time and the textual analysis (Casetti and DiChio, 1999) of the five productions. It is concluded that the Spanish television industry showed determination, creativity and adaptation to the context of crisis, while fiction allows catharsis and makes collective memory with hardly social commitment.

Prisoners of a Metaphor: Secularization as a Deicidal Epidemic

The article discusses the first reactions of many distinguished commentators to the impact that the CoViD-19 pandemic had on people's religious life globally. Such acrossthe-board response is investigated against the background of Peter Sloterdijk's exemplary reinterpretation of the religious vertical impulse in terms of anthropotechnics and is found defective. A more nuanced and ambivalent account of secularization is offered in the end as a viable alternative to the standard thesis of the disenchantment of the world.

Diffusion of the utopias. The academy and the media in times of pandemic

At the end of the 20th century, the disappearance of the great utopias occurs. Crises are favorable moments to imagine better worlds. Social scientists and humanists - because of their knowledge of reality and its possibilities for change - are privileged to visualize the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity for change and transfer the orientation of change to all of society. This is a transcendental translation for the consolidation of utopia in the social imaginary. This work explores the rehabilitation of utopia in the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic's start by academics. Doing this identifies, classifies, and analyzes the specific proposals that these thinkers have published in the press to move towards a happy world. We note that the pandemic has not managed to rehabilitate the utopia and that the community's proposals for change are fragmented. We consider that this fragmentation is a symptom of micro-stories, which implies a shift towards micro-routes. However, medium-range utopias proliferate in which messages appear insistently and, in that sense, may be reflected in the social imaginary.

THE ZOONOTIC CITY: Urban Political Ecology and the Pandemic Imaginary.

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic this article takes a longer view of the evolving relationship between urbanization and the range of zoonotic diseases that have spread from animals to humans. I suggest that the existing interpretation of epidemiological transitions remains overly Eurocentric and requires a more nuanced conception of global environmental history. Similarly, the conceptualization of urban space within these teleological schemas has relied on a narrow range of examples and has failed to fully engage with networked dimensions to urbanization. At an analytical level I consider the potential for extending the conceptual framework offered by urban political ecology to take greater account of the epidemiological dimensions to contemporary urbanization and its associated pandemic imaginary. I examine how contemporary health threats intersect with complex patterns of environmental change, including the destruction of biodiversity (and trade in live animals), the co-evolutionary dynamics of viruses and other pathogens, and wider dimensions to the global technosphere, including food production, infrastructure networks, and the shifting topographies of peri- or ex-urban contact zones.