Pandemic Exposures – Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus

For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this simple alternative belies the complexity of the entanglements the crisis has created and revealed, not just between health and wealth but also around morality, knowledge, governance, culture, and everyday subsistence.   Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade have assembled an eminent team of scholars from across the social sciences, conducting research on six continents, to reflect on the multiple ways the coronavirus has entered, reshaped, or exacerbated existing trends and structures in every part of the globe. The contributors show how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have both hastened the rise of new social divisions and hardened old inequalities and dilemmas. An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath.

"The pandemic should be read as an eye-opening phenomenon, and this is precisely how it is addressed in this outstanding collection.", "This balanced and sober exercise provides a long list of very convincing insights to be gained from the first eighteen months of the pandemic.", "The vital contribution of this volume is that it insists on specificity. It paints a global picture from the ground up, attending to situated empirical particularities.", "Combining sharp theoretical insight with gripping on-the-ground accounts, Pandemic Exposures gifts us with a pathbreaking social analysis of COVID-19's impact. Its formidable editors, Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade, along with an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, artfully decipher the pandemic's paradoxical political, moral, and relational worlds. The book's discoveries will surely shape future research while also captivating all readers eager to understand COVID-19's upheavals."

Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and the Annual Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books in the fields of medical and political anthropology, including Life: A Critical User’s Manual and Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes. Marion Fourcade is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s and has published widely in the fields of economic sociology, culture, and science and technology.