Liz Stanley

A consortium of the leaders of the UK‘s medical, nursing and public health professions on 24 June published a joint letter in the British Medical Journal, sent to the leaders of all UK political parties. It argues for procedures to plan for what happens next, now that strict lockdown has been lifted, because in their view the possibility of a second wave of coronavirus is actually likely rather than just possible. Succinctly, it proposes a cross-party all-interest group or inquiry but which would have planning for what happens next as its aim, rather than enquiring into what went wrong with the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. It proposes that the focus for this inquiry should be:

• “Governance including parliamentary scrutiny and involvement of regional and local structures and leaders
• Procurement of goods and services
• Coordination of existing structures, in a way designed to optimise the establishment of effective public health and communicable disease control infrastructure, the resilience of the NHS as a whole, and the shielding of vulnerable individuals and communities
• The disproportionate burden on black, Asian, and minority ethnic individuals and communities
• International collaboration, especially to mitigate any new difficulties in pandemic management due to Brexit”

Important in its own right, there are a number of aspects worth thinking about in a bit more detail.

First, there is the fact that these professions are working together and doing so through the highly regarded vehicle of the BMJ. The medical, nursing and public health professions are all important, but in worldly and political terms the most powerful of these is the medical profession. The BMJ is a kind of lodestar, with social scientists as much as others working within medical areas aspiring to publication even as one of a very large team in its pages.

Second, the letter is addressed to the leaders of all political parties, not the government specifically or at least not in a public way in this letter. This is itself a sign of the changing times, for even just a few weeks earlier it would have been addressed to the government or some part of it. It is a return to political life that is being signalled in who the letter is addressed to, in which political debate and manoeuvering will resume publicly, for one assumes it had not entirely gone away out of the public eye.

Third, the leaders of the medical, nursing and public health professions have used a letter, a public open letter, to make their intervention. In academic terms, much has been pronounced (wrongly) about the so-called death of the letter. Against this, not only is there a massive upsurge in forms of communication premised on ‘letterness’ aspects, text and email amongst them, but in formal circumstances it is notable that only a written letter directed to a known person and physically signed by the letter-writer will do for legal, official and other public purposes. Using a public letter as the device of communication is a strong signal of intent on the part of identified persons, with their names and positions specified as part of ‘the letter’ overall, which includes its address and sign off as well as its specific content.

And fourth, in the BMJ letter the way that what happens ‘next’ appears is that this might well be rather like previously, unless problem areas are tackled and better forward thinking mechanisms put in place. ‘The future’ is described as ‘the future state of the pandemic’ and the letter is concerned with planning for this. It is notable that there is no sign of an ‘after‘, in the sense of the pandemic coming to an end, of this being a possible state that UK society will be in. Instead there is next, a haunting by a possible future that could be as terrible as what has happened already.

Liz Stanley

The latest issue of the American Sociological Association’s Footnotes, for May/June 2020, has recently appeared. Also available electronically here, it takes the form of a print publication of 46 pages, and is filled with short contributions on the theme of sociology during COVID-19. This is actually sociology in the US, although this is not made clear but is implicit. There are many short and very accessible essays which provide considerable food for thought.

The issue starts with a number of first person narratives by an array of sociologists about their experiences and reactions. This is followed by essays on challenges to the profession and in particular to research productivity because of the foreclosure of, for instance, fieldwork or archival research sites. The bulk of the issue is concerned with sociological insights on COVID-19 provided from the many different sections of the ASA, with each section invited to contribute and 35 short essays resulting. An editorial comments that “Collectively, the articles here make a powerful statement about sociology as a discipline and all it has to contribute to addressing critical societal issues“ (p1). It certainly marks the moment and provides a wide set of thoughtful interesting contributions.

The opening personal narratives (why are they called narratives? They are simply short statements of personal experience and surely there is more to narrative than this) are interesting and at points moving, while being concerned with specific locations and persons. By and large they do not concern any ‘outside’ to the US context. More surprisingly, while COVID-19 is rampaging as a pandemic, including in countries close to the US, there are oddly few points at which the international context is registered across the 35 section essays. The rest of the world barely figures, and instead there is mainly a curious parochialism rooted in the specifics but seeing this as generalities. It is interesting to think about the British equivalent in this respect and whether it too might be fettered by its national roots and specifically British concerns. Casting an eye over the BSA website and the area concerned with COVID-19, and also its members print publication Network, would be interesting in this respect. Comparing Footnotes with the Edinburgh Decameron is like comparing a large fish with a tiny bicycle, but still some interesting points come to mind.

Footnotes speaks on behalf of a national discipline or rather that part of it with membership of the ASA (with some members in other national settings). Contributors to the Edinburgh Decameron speak for ourselves as members of a small located community rather than on behalf of wider groupings. Its localism is deliberate and upfront. Footnotes is concerned with marking a particular point in time through a considered set of statements which mark out the trajectories of the ASA sections and appear in a fixed format. The Edinburgh Decameron is all about process and a plethora of voices, often disagreeing, and its contributions appear at any point at which someone has something to say, so it is always changing. Footnotes is rather dominated by the print format. Many of its contributions are split between pages, appearing on one page, and then continuing at the bottom or the side of the next rather than following directly on. This makes for a disjointed process of reading, with the mind’s eye going from one essay topic, which is left part-way through, to another only 2/3 finished, then picking up the earlier, then finishing off the following, and so on and so on. It is certainly available in an electronic version, but it is conceived with print in mind.  The Edinburgh Decameron takes a form dominated by WordPress templates, and its curators (information on the website) find the blog templates not entirely satisfactory for both recording specific localisms in an unfolding processual way, and creating an archive in which readers can easily find past as well as present posts. It is/not a blog. Broad anonymised data in analytics shows a general pattern of reading that starts with recent posts, and from there goes onto other material, with some pages only glancingly arrived on, and others having much time spent on them. 

But the Edinburgh Decameron is indeed a small and local community response, and obviously the better comparison is between the ASA and the BSA. Contributions on this are called for! And what about other national sociologies? Also greatly welcomed would be more contributions from past and present, and also future, members of the Edinburgh community living outwith Scotland and the UK. A pandemic is a pandemic and we bracket other parts of the world at our collective peril.

Nick Prior

Do you mask up? Amidst the unbearable tragedies unfolding around Covid 19, one might be forgiven for failing to notice that people in these islands have slowly taken to the idea that wearing a face covering or protective mask of some kind might help mitigate the spread of the virus. Decorator’s masks, surgical masks, washable masks, makeshift masks, branded masks, three-layered masks, Joy Division masks – people appear increasingly willing to don a lower-face covering procured in whatever way they can, to protect themselves and others. News feeds feature almost daily updates on the scientific evidence for and against the mask’s effectiveness in reducing transmission, as well as which types of masks are the most effective, where to get them, and how to stylise your own fashionable mask in order to stand out from the Covid crowd. (Bourdieusian sociologists won’t be surprised to hear that cultural distinction operates even in the midst of a global pandemic). Not unlike the beak-like plague masks of 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century Europe, the protective mask has – alongside rainbows and representations of the spikes of the coronavirus itself – come to symbolise the pandemic. It is now part of the semiotic landscape of our Covid times. Unmasking some sociological components of face coverings might, therefore, give us traction in understanding elements of our current predicament. 

There are four things that interest me, here. First, masks are politically potent objects, subject to the ideological work of nation states, city authorities and global institutions. When scarce they become indicative of the state’s failure to plan or to protect front-line workers. When their efficacy is disputed, they are subject to a bewildering outpouring of information from competing agencies, the advice changing almost daily or weekly. The news that the Word Health Organisation (WHO) has changed its guidance on wearing masks – declaring that masks should be worn in public areas in order to reduce the spread of the virus – shows how the mask is a mutable wearable. Its purpose and meaning is constantly changing as a result of the deliberations and struggles of powerful social and political actors. While in Scotland, the government is, at time of writing, considering making wearing face coverings compulsory on public transport and inside public venues, in the U.S. masks have moved centre stage in an increasingly divisive political environment. The decision to wear a mask appears to be as much a political as a health choice, with both President Trump and presidential hopeful Joe Biden taking opposing actions on whether (to be seen) to wear one.

Important differences exist beyond the realms of governance, privilege and power, however. We already know that Covid 19 has impacted more heavily on BAME communities and that experiences of lockdown are socially stratified according to wealth and political influence, access to green space, child support, healthy food, and so on. That the lowly mask is also caught in structures of social division should not entirely surprise us, then. Cost and supply are always factors, of course, but so too basic decision-making processes around the risks attached to wearing a mask by particular social and ethnic groups. Hence, in an atmosphere of uncertainty, protest and unrest – made more acute in the wake of police brutality against African Americans and the murder of George Floyd – it is clear that some members of the black community have decided not to wear a mask in order to reduce the risk of serious harm from a police force that sees a partially obscured black face as reason enough for suspicion, harassment or worse (link in Japanese). 

Second, while Covid 19’s ruse is that it cruelly exploits the very thing that makes us human (contact, communication, connection) a protective mask is designed precisely not to be an absolute barrier to the outside world for the same reason. It makes invisible only part of our faces, for it must still allow for some of the basics of interaction. It’s not a hazmat mask or protective helmet, after all. The mask meets the fiendish invisibility of the virus with its visible counterpart – a shield, of sorts – but an imperfect one that doesn’t cover every facial opening and may give the wearer a false sense of security. Even in its surgical form it is a semi-permeable boundary, comprising innumerable but imperceptible apertures of the gauze. It therefore dramatizes and makes evident the vulnerability of the wearer and those around them. One of the most appalling statistics of this pandemic concerns the number of front-line health workers who have lost their lives in this outbreak. Many of them patently did possess protective masks and other forms of PPE, albeit distributed too late or in a faulty, sub-standard or even second-hand state.

Third, a mask transforms core elements of the interaction order and the mundane dynamics of sociality. From the shop encounter to the chance meeting, masks intervene in the intricate play of language and gesture, face work and forms of talk. For the interactionist sociologist, the mask is already, of course, a metaphor for the work that goes into playing a role or conveying desirable characteristics to others. The mask adds another non-human layer into interpersonal situations, making it potentially harder to read the intentions of others and the subtle levels of communication that are already at play. It means we have to work extra hard to look for and hear the signifiers of meaning: were they being serious, are they angry, sincere, disappointed, ironic, upset? In a hear-rending article written by a beleaguered doctor dealing daily with dying patients with coronavirus, the doctor writes movingly about having to soothe a dying man through thick wads of PPE. “Behind our masks”, she writes, “we strain to hear each other speak and are forced to second guess our colleagues’ expressions. Being protected entails being dehumanised.”

And what of speech, the mouth and humanism? Would it be a Derridean stretch to say that Western societies, with their emphasis on voice and speech, are peculiarly ill-equipped to deal with these attenuated forms of interaction? Is this one of the many reasons why European nations have been slow to adopt masks as part of everyday face apparel? There is a strand of thought that suggests that many countries in East Asia (South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Taiwan), have suffered less catastrophic human loss during the pandemic precisely because these are societies where mask wearing is common in everyday life. And members of these societies have found ways to co-exist with them while maintaining a richness of human communication. In Japan there is a well known proverb – “me wa kuchi hodo ni mono wo iu” which roughly translates as “the eyes can tell you as much as the mouth”. What we might call “eye-work” and the “reading” of eyes is a strong component of how members of Japanese society go about their business while masked, supported by a reliance on para-linguistic context. Exploring how culture shapes and gets into behaviour and action during the pandemic, then, is an important task for the sociologist not least because cultural matters can be matters of life and death.

Fourth, the Covid situation has sparked into being myriad cultures of amateur mask production, instigating a whole DIY infrastructure of makers geared towards providing stock for those in need. In Edinburgh, Edinburgh Mask Makers organise themselves on a supply-and-demand basis, with a Facebook page combined with a series of physical drop off boxes around the city. Typically, a call goes out from a service or group for a number of face masks, and individual makers commit a certain amount until the total is reached. Volunteers have also developed a buddy system of direct transaction to avoid unnecessary group administration and people donate various materials, like fabric, to the group. Linked initiatives for the borrowing and swapping of sewing machine hardware have also sprung up. There’s more than a whiff of what Mason calls post-capitalism at work here: a self-organised network of digitally and physically connected individuals, working on an entirely voluntary basis, to meet a human need. If there is some positivity to take from the pandemic it is surely in how networks like these – and the acts of kindness and support that have taken root – have fomented. How we harness these energies in order to imagine new futures will be a key question for those interested in not returning to the “old normal”.

As for the mask, there’s a good chance that it may be here to stay and that we need to get used to it as a material presence on our faces and in our towns, cities and communities. That might mean a recalibration of what constitutes the public sphere and the interactions that happen there, perhaps even necessitating new skills of interaction and ways of being human. It is worth remembering that the invisible counterpart to the mask is 0.1mm thick, and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. 

10^th June 2020