The effects of COVID-19 are visited disproportionately on the already disadvantaged.
This important text maps out ways in which those already disadvantaged have been affected by legal responses to COVID-19. Contributors tackle issues including virtual trials, adult social care, racism, tax and spending, education and more. They reflect on the implications of COVID-19 and express concerns with policy and practice developments and with the neutral version of the law and the economy which has taken root.
Drawing on diverse resources, this text offers an account of the damage caused by legal responses to the pandemic and demonstrates how the future response can be positive and productive.
In challenging social science’s established orthodoxies, this first in a series of books is a call for its disciplines to embrace new theoretical paradigms and research methods to better understand the reality of life in a post-COVID world.
By offering a detailed insight into the harmful effects of neoliberalism before the pandemic, as well as the intervallic period the world is currently living through, the authors show how it is more important than ever for social science to evolve and take a leading role in contextualising the biggest crisis of the 21st century.
This is a critical blueprint for ongoing debates about the COVID-19 pandemic and alternative modes of research.
Pandemics and risk narratives The media and representations of risk In modern global societies, events happening in distant places can affect our lives in unexpected ways and we gain knowledge about such events from various media. Towards the end of 2019, a new virus spread in the Chinese city of Wuhan and the first reports were on social media; for example, Dr Li Wenliang’s message on a Chinese chatroom on 30 December 2019 about the quarantining of SARS cases alerted infectious disease specialists worldwide that there was a new virus (Honigsbaum, 2020 , pp
Let’s start our tale about researching in a pandemic with the beginning of a story: Sam has been keeping in touch with friends online during the COVID-19 Lockdown, and learned that some of them are going to meet up in the big local park, just after dark, to hang out and have a drink… They’re encouraging Sam to come along… We invite you to imagine how you might tell the rest of this story, or indeed to go ahead and write it. We ask you to then reflect on what emotions this scenario evokes for you. The research we describe in this chapter stemmed from emotional
How do we maintain core values and rights when governments impose restrictive measures on our lives?
Declaring a state of emergency is the best way to protect public health in a pandemic but how do these powers differ from those for national security and economic crises?
This book explores how human rights, democracy and the rule of law can be protected during a pandemic and how emergency powers can best be ended once it wanes.
Written by an expert on constitutional law and human rights, this accessible book will shape how governments, opposition, courts and society as a whole view future pandemic emergency powers.
Rated as a top 10 book about the COVID-19 pandemic by New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/07/best-books-about-covid-19-pandemic
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC- ND
It has been claimed that we are ‘all in it together’ and that the COVID-19 virus ‘does not discriminate’.
This accessible, yet authoritative book dispels this myth of COVID-19 as an ‘equal opportunity’ disease, by showing how the pandemic is a syndemic of disease and inequality.
Drawing on international data and accounts, it argues that the pandemic is unequal in three ways: it has killed unequally, been experienced unequally and will impoverish unequally.
These inequalities are a political choice: with governments effectively choosing who lives and who dies, we need to learn from COVID-19 quickly to prevent growing inequality and to reduce health inequalities in the future.
COVID-19 is an unequal pandemic.
Introduction Chapter Two (Pandemics and Human Rights: Non-Derogable Rights) and Chapter Three (Pandemics and Human Rights: Derogable Rights) focused on the impact that pandemics can have on human rights. I argued that declaring a state of emergency would be the best way to ensure that these exceptional powers remain temporary and that their deployment would not lead the way to their future application outside a pandemic situation. Yet the judiciary alone cannot – and should not – be the sole defender of human rights; the legislature and the executive
Introduction I have spent more time wondering about how to start this chapter on ‘governing’ during the pandemic than actually writing it. Perhaps it could start with the almost daily shock felt in reading headlines and tweets linking Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) contracts and key personnel with the ruling party. Or we might start with the shift in the way of legislating which, on analyses from both the left and the right, has undermined the rule of law and the accountability of the Executive. What was said – rhetorically – about the ‘elected
As cases of COVID-19 increased and the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic, reports on the gendered impacts of the virus streamed in. While acknowledging that there have been higher mortality rates among men, women’s rights organizations called for attention to other, less initially visible repercussions faced by women and girls. Due to their disproportionate representation within the healthcare sector, for example, women may be at higher risk of exposure to COVID-19 (CARE, 2020 ). That women are still the primary caregivers within the home could
