COVID-19: Surviving a Pandemic

COVID-19: Surviving a Pandemic provides critical insights into survival strategies employed by communities and individuals around the world during the pandemic. A central question since this pandemic began has been how to survive it. That question has applied not just to staying alive, but also to staying healthy, both physically and mentally. Survival is certainly key, but surviving, and what that means, is also critical. The scholarship included in this volume will take a closer look at what it means to survive by addressing such issues as the importance of ethnicity in vaccine uptake, the gendered and racialized impacts of the pandemic, the impact on those with disabilities, questions of food security, and what it means to grieve. 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: 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. Surviving a Pandemic 3. Towards a Sociology of Catastrophe: The case of COVID-19 4. This is What I Grieve Now 5. Carceral Archipelago and Gulag of Grief: Hart Island 6. Pandemic Eugenics: The Delta variant, child mortality, and the new racism 7. Food Insecurity in the United States of America: A comparison between the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic 8. Coping with COVID-19 in Lebanon: A Social Psychological Perspective 9. Disclosing One's HIV Status during Indonesia's COVID-19 Pandemic: Challenges faced by mothers 10. Managing COVID-19 (and Gender): An analysis of US news coverage on reported menstrual disruptions and vaccines 11. The Significance of Ethnicity in Vaccination Uptake: Social psychological aspects 12. "Protecting Our Most Vulnerable": Vaccination targets, situated knowledges, and the needs of people with disabilities during New Zealand's COVID-19 lockdown 13. Vaccines: Are we really all in this together?