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Recording and commenting in stories, accounts and moments about the pandemic unfolding
Author: Liz Stanley
Liz Stanley is Professor of Sociology @ University of Edinburgh, email liz.stanley@ed.ac.uk. I’m a feminist sociologist who works on everyday documents of life, particularly letters, to research social change over time.
The fifth in the Armchair Sociology series of informal conversations facilitated by Liz Stanley is with Gil Viry and explores themes concerning experts, science & pandemic sociology. In the UK coronavirus context, ‘expertise’ is closely associated with people who produce ‘the numbers’, and these constitute ‘the science’ that politicians say they are following. And are there differences when compared with Switzerland and other countries? Also, what kind of experts are they, and what issues exist concerning ‘the facts’ produced, the assumptions they rest on, the kind of discourse they are located in, the claims they make about certainties? And how does this pan out regarding such things as vulnerability and shielding?
The video of this conversation can be accessed on The Armchair Sociologist YouTube channel here.
Gil Viry is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the role of space and spatial mobilities on family and personal relationships, social inclusion and the life course. His approach to family life in space and time includes the spatiality of personal networks and mobility biographies using social network and sequence analysis. He is currently working on some interdisciplinary projects using advanced methods of social network analysis for analysing the geography of personal networks. Since 2013, he has been leading the Social Network Analysis in Scotland (SNAS) Research Group.
Among repeated buzz terms about coronavirus and UK government responses are ‘following the science’ and the much stronger ‘driven by the science’. Their main use has been to present political policies as embedded in or even required by scientific evidence and advice, thereby giving greater authority to political decision-making through associating it with the assumption of expertise conveyed in references to ‘the science’. ‘The science’ is another of these frequently used buzz terms. It exists in a family-group with the ‘following’ and ‘driven’ ones and is homogenised as single and indivisible and having a kind of absolute authority. Such usages disregard the range of professional expertises involved and not only the differences and sometimes clashes between them but also divergences within particular scientific networks.
In the Covid-19 pandemic context, while there has been public attention rightfully given to political decision-making and its frequent ineptitude, there has been surprisingly little critical reflection upon what is claimed or simply assumed to be scientific expertise, including its use by politicians to justify political expediency. So far as can be discerned from the relatively few public-facing sociological responses currently visible, this includes its absence from sociological attention too, although this may change. It is all the more refreshing then that some political journalists are now turning their gaze in the direction of ‘the science‘ and the political work it is doing.
The Coronavirus News is an online part of the BBC’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with a magazine format, one aspect of which is ‘The Coronavirus Newscast’ series of podcasts. The high-profile journalists involved are Adam Fleming and Laura Kuenssberg, Fergus Walsh and Chris Mason. On 21 May, the podcast of an interview by Fleming and Kuenssberg with Sir Ian Boyd, a zoologist and polar scientist who was chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from 2012-19, was published on the Newscast webpage. Boyd is presently a member of the Sage advisory group, which combines high-level members of the scientific community with government politicians, and it is in this capacity he was interviewed.
Interviewers Fleming and Kuenssberg asked Ian Boyd thoughtful questions about vaccine development, ‘test, track and trace’, and in particular ‘the science‘ comments that UK government politicians have frequently made in justifying their decisions and policies. The point was made that divergences and uncertainties and not uniform certainty exist within the scientific community, which anyway is not one and indivisible. However, politicians nonetheless lay claim to ‘the science‘ as justification for decisions that actually include many other factors too. This was an amiable discussion and raised interesting points but did not pursue them in any great depth. Given the practical importance of ‘the science‘, perhaps the interviewers felt they could not push this further, but clearly wider issues about the character of science, its political uses and notions of expertise more generally were hovering, but were not picked up.
At the point this might have been pursued, the interview format gave way to addressing questions from listeners and largely lost its Fleming and Kuenssberg provided critical edge. The questions covered included why taste and smell took so long to be included as indications of COVID-19, when more detail would be given about a ‘social bubble’ approach, shielding, and with hindsight what political actions Boyd wished had been taken earlier. On this latter, however, the journalists did press him harder. Responding rightly that hindsight knowledge is easy but acting at the time in unfolding circumstances is not, Boyd discussed in a careful way whether lockdown policies could have been introduced earlier. In this respect, Fleming mentioned a 17 February official document recognising that infections were even then increasing rapidly, but only significantly later did the political landscape change.
Not named by Boyd nor Fleming or Kuenssberg, at this juncture the mind leapt to earlier ideas about ‘herd immunity’ and permitting deaths to increase to a level where the majority of the population would become immune, for that at that stage scientific and political ideas seemed to combine to see an increase in deaths as not entirely undesirable. It appears to have been the unanticipated scale of the deaths and rapidity of the increase, rather than ‘the science’, that changed the political landscape. Or was something different going on behind-the-scenes?
The podcast is well worth listening to as seriously questioning ‘the science‘ and its political uses; it can be accessed online via the BBC’s The Coronavirus News pages. For those interested specifically in the Ian Boyd segment, this started at 10:42 minutes in and finished at 33:16. The interview was also reported on the BBC news app on 22 May, ‘Coronavirus: acting earlier would have save lives, says Sage member’.
But what of ‘the science‘ and what might the social sciences and in particular sociology be doing regarding it? Or do we just throw our hands up and leave it to perspicacious journalists to offer an analysis?
There is a wealth of excellent sociological theory and research concerned with science, scientific networks and practices. Time for its proponents and other sociologists influenced by this work to step forward. Which kinds of scientists are proposing ‘the facts‘, what variations are there, and how are these changing over time? are there divergences and fault-lines that are not appearing in the public domain? what networks exist to enable such work to be picked up and used by policymakers at all levels of governance? how is ‘science’ being characterised? These and related questions are important for understanding not only to how policy-makers operate, but also how the general run of people respond to unfolding events. If nothing else, the hordes of British people over the last few days crowding onto sunlit beaches and into country beauty-spots indicates that there is widespread doubt about or even straightforward rejection of both political pronouncements and invocations of ‘the science‘ regarding social distancing, indeed regarding the coronavirus as such.
How to explain this? At the least it opens up the ground beneath hallowed science as providing ‘the facts’ that everyone can be expected to act on, and shows that assessments of ‘risk‘ are part of individual/group decision-making. And here another set of sociological thinking and research comes into frame, the interactional sociologies and taking seriously that people are proficient theorisers of their own lives and therefore the how and why of what they do need to be taken seriously in understanding why social life turns out as it does.
Sociological work of these and related kinds need to be embarked upon now, if not already underway; and to appear widely in public fora as circumstances are unfolding, not just three or four years down the line in funded research projects of the kind being badged as ‘opportunities‘ (an ethically dubious term given the scale of deaths worldwide) on numerous sociology websites. Sociology asks complicated questions about why things are as they are and people do as they do, using the lively curiosity about ‘the facts’ of social life that characterises the sociological imagination and its concern with biography, time and social structure. This needs putting into practice now in a new way, given present circumstances, in thinking hard about the changes occurring and the likely reverberations over time.
Please share examples by leaving comments on the Edinburgh Decameron website.
The fourth in the Armchair Sociology series of informal conversations facilitated by Liz Stanley is with Eve Livingston, and focuses on different aspects of the state in relation to caring work, homelessness, poverty, and structural inequalities of different kinds. There are curious contradictions, witnessed by the UK Conservative government’s initiatives with regard to homelessness, unemployment and related matters. Whether these will persist is also discussed, including in relation to migrant labour of different kinds and also coronavirus tracking and surveillance technologies.
The video of the conversation can be accessed on The Armchair Sociologist YouTube channel here.
Eve Livingston is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs, inequalities and politics. She writes for The Guardian, The Independent, VICE, OpenDemocracy and more, and is currently working on a book for Pluto Press about trade unions and young workers. For her website, go to everebeccalivingston.com.
Images of the coronavirus and Covid-19 specifically have become a familiar sight. A bunch of them, shown in the screenshots here, have been harvested from web sources over the period since mid-February – and for each one, a dozen more sits alongside it. But where do they come from, who owns them in a copyright sense, and what is their status in factual terms?
Following these images into Google-provided live-links regarding possible copyright matters yields a research or an organisational text or simply general information on copyright. Only rarely does an indication of ownership appear on the images, nor if or how they can be reproduced. Also the links, except very exceptionally, do not provide information about where and how the images have originated, whether by a graphic artist, whether through a process of actually photographing the coronavirus, some combination of these, or what. They are, rather than they have become, what Covid-19 looks like.
These images have become as familiar in the communicative spaces of media and television reporting as are street signs and billboard advertising in public places. And they are taken on trust even though they look so different. This is what it looks like. Oh, this is what it looks like. That is what it looks like. Here it is and it’s like this. Or that. Such images have become so familiar that the variations on the theme pass without comment. Where from and why the variations?
The gleaming eye of the tiger – and we casually and almost unseeingly stare into it, accepting, and with the questions not asked or not pursued.
The third in the Armchair Sociology series of informal conversations facilitated by Liz Stanley is with Nicolas Zehner and is concerned with terms in frequent use, such as before and after and what will happen in the future, and which have taken on a very different resonance in the wake of Covid-19. Do these things pan out very differently between Germany, where he is presently located, and the UK? What about other national contexts and their histories? And does social theory on the future still stand-up or might changes in emphasis and approach be required?
The video of this conversation will be found on The Armchair Sociologist YouTube channel here.
Nicolas Zehner is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Edinburgh. Nicolas is researching the intersection of the sociology of imagination and urban assemblage thinking by investigating how urban planning agents imagine data-driven futures. Twitter: @Nicolas_Zehner
Death, or the fear of death, forces most people without question to put on a mask, gloves, wash their hands, and spy on their neighbours to check if they too are abiding by the rules. However, what if you had no fear of death, how would you be feeling just now, through this pandemic? I think I am one of those people. I already live in a reality where time has changed, my comfortable social structures disappeared overnight, and people became socially distanced. Two years ago, I watched my beautiful 12-year-old son die from brain and spinal cancer.
I can remember clearly, when he took his last breath in our bed surrounded by me (his Mum), Dad, brothers and dog (tucked beautifully along his legs). This felt a familiar experience, it somehow felt like the birth experience but in reverse. I had supported him into the world, and now I was supporting him out of the world, I would have travelled with him if somehow possible. There are no words that are adequate to describe being present as the bodily processes begin to shut down, to observe it feels like an out of body experience. Yet, paradoxically you are more present than you have ever been. There is point when consciousness is lost and you can see and hear the person taking Cheyne-Stroke breaths, but at the same time there can be a very strong feeling they have already left…
I think comparatively about people in hospital unable to be with their loved ones in their final days and hours. Although it is impossible to know how a dying person feels, it must be even more confusing and frightening alone with no physical contact. Social distancing appears to have taken over every aspect of our reality, right up until death… I wonder if it will become more normalised with all the public numbers of the Covid deaths, or will it be feared more. Or it may be tucked away in books and research, similar to the deaths in concentration camps. What I do know is more control and choice have been taken away from vulnerable and dying people on a global scale. I think of how I would have felt if I had been unable to be with my son through the last moments of his life. It is unimaginable, I am not sure I would still be alive. Unfortunately, I am not speculating, a 13-year-old boy did die alone in London not long into lockdown.
Going forward, the fallout from the pandemic will be immeasurable. I know only too well how many years it can take to try to process a disease that ravages the body. Focus nationally has been for our NHS heroes, and while they are doing a brave job, there is no experience that takes more bravery than dying. Pre-pandemic, people could be present and support their loved ones through the only predictable process we will all face. I see pictures in the paper of faces that have lost the battle to Covid, yet very few of us can really imagine what it is like to go through that process we simply refer to as ‘dying’. When we watch images from hospitals, we focus on the machines, equipment and staff, what about the human under the machines?
Death is one of the most severe and complex social events that will occur in a person’s life. I wonder what happened to the end of life care plans, the wishes, rights and values of the person dying in isolation. How can we dictate the personal and individual experience of dying? Through my own experience it makes me think how little consideration there is about dying through this pandemic, only we are made to believe it needs prevented at all costs.
Leanne Clapperton is a 45 year old Sociology student living in Edinburgh with her family. Leanne enjoys all sociology subject matter but is particularly interested in the social aspects of death, dying and bereavement.
An interesting visual depiction of pandemics in past times appeared on internet sites a while ago, with these placed in an order of how the most to the least lethal has been gauged. It uses a fuzzy ball shape for each, seemingly based on Covid-19 images. It originates with an internet body called VisualCapitalist.com. It shows a rogues gallery, with each pandemic fuzzy ball standing for much pain and suffering, millions of deaths, enormous grief, and profound changes in the social, economic and political order.
The website is published by an editorial team at VisualCapitalist.com under the caption of Covid-19 and provides some connected visuals and text on ‘the facts’ for the various pandemics featured. Its ranking of pandemic morbidities from the Black Death (most morbidity) through to SARS (least morbidity) rests on sources which the text and footnotes acknowledge are sometimes less than fully reliable.
For instance, what it calls ‘Spanish Flu‘ is not usually called this now and wasn’t generally called this at the time. Spain was neutral during World War I and had wider reporting of non-war items than combatant countries, and its King had had the influenza; and the 1918 to 1920 pandemic was given many names, at different times and in different places. Also the figure of 200 million deaths in this pandemic is a guesstimate on a range which other sources indicate as starting with something much less than this and ending with something rather more.
The VisualCapitalist.com website provides some helpful information about its graphics and data and its mission concern with media changes and the role of data in this. It is an organisation with a mission, and its account of this is interesting.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/
However and in spite of its footnotes and brief cautionary comments, its view of ‘the facts’ of pandemics in past times and the data used still has to be taken on trust.
So what do these images add
up to? They are posters, with the advantages and
disadvantages of such. They are striking in having a colourful and visually
striking clarity in conveying information. The ‘history of pandemics‘
information is laid out in bite-size chunks on them with one pandemic following
another in morbidity order, and in fact covering a vast time-period although
this is difficult to discern without scrutiny of the small font captions
beneath each pandemic image. And the ubiquity of this fuzzy ball image does a
lot of work, for as well as being striking it coveys, perhaps without really
meaning to, that these pandemic are linked and take the same visual ‘viral’ form as Covid-19.
‘The Armchair Sociologist’ YouTube channel has just been launched. This is part of the Edinburgh Decameron project, and links to it are provided via the Armchair Sociology tab on the homepage. It features very informal ‘warts and all‘ conversations concerned with the process of rethinking sociological imaginations in progress. The first three videos have been uploaded and within just a day or two are already achieving a good number of views. These and the conversations to come are all concerned with how sociological imaginations of different kinds might respond to the fundamental issues that varied experiences of the coronavirus pandemic and all that goes with it are raising.
Excellent discussion of contradictory facets in UK government policy for tackling the pandemic published in the The Guardian (access here) on 12 May, by Devi Lalita Sridhar, Professor of Global Public Health, University of Edinburgh. One: track, trace, tame? Two: slow the spread, build health capacity for cycles of lockdown and release? Three: do nothing, brave new herd immunity world with UK millions dead? No, even better – a headless chicken tack between them – “It’s almost impossible to decipher which path the UK government has chosen. Over the past months, its response has vacillated from the third approach to the second and, more recently, to the first”. Important reading.
Katie Metzler is an associate vice president at Sage Publishing and involved with social science outputs for over for 15 years. Writing in the Times Higher Education Online, accessed here, she has posed the question of whether the coronavirus pandemic ultimately will be a good or a bad thing for the social sciences, because the social sciences can ask the kinds of questions and examine the kinds of topics that the expertise from other disciplines does not take account of. Criticisms, she points out, have complained that the government might listen to social science at all because only medical expertise is seen to really count in present circumstances. So much for Twitter and other social media and their users’ comprehension of what is currently unfolding. She also proposes that the research agendas of the social sciences will need to change profoundly, for “it does feel as though this is the time for the whole to become greater than the sum of its parts, and for specialists to bring their expertise and insight together not just to cope with the crisis but to help promote a regrowth of culture, society and economy in ways that enable future generations to further flourish”. But can and should disciplinary differences be elided in the way implied here, what about different agendas and approaches and the benefits of pursuing these rather than mashing them together? Also the idea of ‘promoting regrowth‘ seems rather tame and mechanistic, especially when the current mood seems to be more one of seizing the opportunity to make something better.
