Nature or technics? Sars-CoV-2, new materialisms and critique of the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The Sars-CoV-2 pandemic urges environmental sociology to reflect on the appropriate approaches to account for it. For long the discipline was dominated by the debate between realism and constructivism, de facto privileging the latter. The "ontological turn” in the social and human sciences has brought to the fore anti-dualistic materialisms, on paper suited to deal with a socio-material hybrid such as Sars-CoV-2. However, the emancipatory implications drawn from the critique of modern dualisms are not reflected in a situation in which value extraction coincides ever more with a denial of the distinction between nature and technology. The debate over the Anthropocene provides a perspective useful to bring clarity. Copyright © FrancoAngeli.