COVID-19: Individual Rights and Community Responsibilities

COVID-19: Individual Rights and Community Responsibilities provides critical insights into the tensions between individual rights and community responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions about mandates, lockdowns, priorities, and broader questions related to neighborly responsibilities and human rights have been central to debates about how to confront the pandemic. The scholarship presented in this volume adds to those debates by confronting such issues as the role of social media in spreading misinformation, mask mandates, pandemic politics, and the very ethos of what is meant by human and individual rights. Drawing on the expertise of scholars from around the world, the work presented here represents a remarkable diversity and quality of impassioned scholarship on the impact of COVID-19 and is a timely and critical advance in knowledge related to the pandemic.

J. Michael Ryan is an award-winning teacher who has held academic positions at top-ranked universities across five continents. He is currently Associate Professor of sociology at Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) and has previously held academic positions in Egypt, Portugal, Ecuador, and the USA. Before returning to academia, Dr. Ryan worked as a research methodologist at the National Center for Health Statistics (which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) in Washington, DC, where he led multiple projects aimed at improving national statistical survey methodology. He is the author (with Serena Nanda) of COVID-19: Social Inequalities and Human Possibilities (Routledge 2022) and (co-)editor of more than 15 volumes, including COVID-19: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions (Routledge 2021), COVID-19: Social Consequences and Cultural Adaptations (Routledge 2021), and Core Concepts in Sociology (Wiley 2019). He is also the founding editor of Routledge's The COVID-19 Pandemic Series.

1. Introduction 2. COVID-19, Individual Rights and Community Responsibilities 3. Balancing Rights with Responsibilities: Citizens' Responses to Expert Systems COVID-19 Infodemics 4. Going Viral: How social media increased the spread of COVID-19 misinformation 5. Masks, Mandates, and Mayhem: The Moral Panic Amidst a Pandemic 6. Demonizing the Nightlife: The 'Pandemic Panic' and youth responses in Portugal and Spain 7. Pandemic Politics and the Politics of the Pandemic 8. Spreading Disease: Risk mismanagement in the age of COVID-19 9. Taking Responsibility: COVID-19 and the possibilities of participatory communication during crisis 10. Reshaping Values and Priorities after the Lockdown Restrictions in Italy 11. Neighborhood Solidarity as a Local Response to the Emergency of the Pandemic: An explorative study of informal support in Italy 12. No Magic Bullets: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for the future of health and human rights