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Category: Outlook Tower & Sociological Imaginations

How is sociology done during a pandemic? The sociological imagination sees the social in all things, while terms like pandemic appear to halt analysis and close off some imagined futures. Sociologically minded folk are challenged to discover the ways in which the pandemic shapes and is shaped by social relations and the role of theory and method in this. ‘Outlook Tower’, once the base for Patrick Geddes and the development of urban sociology, is now a busy tourist presence in Edinburgh’s cityscape and acts as a useful metaphor – both as an ivory ‘lookout’ tower and also as deeply involved in the quotidian life of the city. The irony is increased, because its main attraction now is its camera obscura, a curious device which both records and distorts, and it too acts as a metaphor for sociological discourse. Posts appear in date order most recent first, so please read through. And to contribute, please contact Liz Stanley at liz.stanley@ed.ac.uk
#socimaginations

Pandemics in past times – a rogues gallery

by Liz Stanley

  • https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

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.

  • https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/

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.

Unless the government changes tack, the UK’s lockdown will have been for nothing

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.

What social science can offer us in a time of COVID-19

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.

Armchair Sociology 2, Sociality and relationship in and after the pandemic

Armchair Sociology is a series of informal ‘in progress’ conversations on key challenges either brought into being or raised to consciousness because of the coronavirus pandemic and which sociological imaginations need to get to grips with. For more information, visit the post on What’s happening to sociological imaginations?. Facilitated by Liz Stanley, this conversation with Orla Murray is concerned with the ways in which sociality and relationship are being remade, including in relation to teaching and researching, as we enter a ‘social bubble’ context.

The video on YouTube can be accessed here.

Dr. Órla Meadhbh Murray is a feminist sociologist who completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh (2018). Her PhD used Dorothy Smith’s work on institutional ethnography to explore UK university audit processes. Órla is currently working at Imperial College London on SIDUS, alongside developing methodological resources and writing a monograph based on her PhD (forthcoming 2022, Bristol University Press).

Armchair Sociology 1, Time and the Covid-19 Lockdown

Armchair Sociology is a series of informal ‘in progress’ conversations on key challenges either brought into being or raised to consciousness because of the coronavirus pandemic and which sociological imaginations need to get to grips with. The conversations are facilitated by Liz Stanley, with the first with Jennifer Morris and Derek Morris on time and the oddities of how it is being experienced under lockdown ‘social bubble’ circumstances by differently situated people.

This first conversation was something of a try-out, not so much of the topic, as we had email exchanged about this previously, but how best to record it. Skype was the preference because likely to be on people’s machines in different parts of the world, and Zoom and Teams among others less so. But there were some problems with two people sharing one laptop not visible when recording – in going for the midpoint, the software cut off bits of Jen and Derek in playback. We did it again – but the spontaneity and fun went. So we present here something technically flawed, but really enjoyable to have been part of. And we’ll know better next time.

The recording we made can be accessed on YouTube here.

Derek Morris is a PhD student in Socio-cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is a US Iraq War veteran with research interests in soldiers and their relation to society through autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and the Documents of Life approach. He has worked as a research assistant in GIS on a NASA Space Grant, taught ESL in Istanbul, Turkey, and received an MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at Trinity College, Dublin.

Jennifer Morris is a freelance writer, designer, and editor in online language exam development. She is a founding member of the Communicative English Proficiency Assessment (CEPA®) and its associated research and development group in Turkey, though she lives with her partner who is a PhD candidate in Edinburgh. She is in the final phase of publishing a study in her field on the praxis of Evidence Centered Design (ECD) framework. She holds a MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts and her research interests include foreign language pedagogy and testing development, language policy, sociolinguistics, and institutes of higher education.

A new approach to social sciences

A new approach to social sciences, humanities in a time of crisis, Jess Auerbach and Nina Hall
The University World News of 8 May 2020 has a very interesting lead item, a think-piece on the key issues that need to be addressed in responding to what should be living in a changed world. The authors pick out compassion and empathy for others as an underlying principle, the reconfiguration of thought around being inside the body and experiencing events in a visceral way, and creating new visions of how to put into practice social science. They also comment, “We can amplify the voices of those who propose working together, rather than those who would have a stay apart. We can petition for equitable relief within economic regions and we can participate in the reimagination of everything from the moral economy to food systems and social solidarity.“ Think differently, because there is no going back, is the bottom line of their message. This is a thoughtful contribution to reimagining the social sciences and is well worth reading. Access it here.

Thinking Comparatively

Graham Crow

The sociological habit of thinking comparatively across time and space proves particularly useful at times when the familiar world is turned upside down and we are forced to reflect on what is ‘normal’. To-day my principal role was to act as internal examiner for a PhD viva in the changed circumstances of COVID-19 ‘lockdown’. The ‘new normal’ is the viva conducted virtually (in our case via Skype), and the whole thing passed off successfully aside from a delay to our schedule related to connection issues. Certainly academic standards were not allowed to slip.

In the run up to the viva I had remembered a passage from Harrison E. Salisbury’s book about the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War when the city was surrounded and Hitler’s troops and their allies sought over a period of nearly three years to starve the population into submission. Defiance by the city’s occupants was famously crystallised by Shostakovich’s Symphony number 7 and its remarkable performance in the city (as well as elsewhere). But Salisbury’s book recounts many other acts of resistance, including the example of which I was reminded this week: ‘The presentation and defense of doctoral dissertations had gone on without pause in Leningrad, all through the terrible winter [of 1941-2], in air-raid shelters, in cellars. There had been 847 defences of dissertations in the first months of the war. In December [1941] the Leningrad Party Committee warned the academic community “not to permit any liberalization in evaluating the work of students” just because of the war and its hardships. So the intellectual life of Leningrad went on….’ [1].

Estimates of the people who died during the 900 days vary but at well over a million dwarf those for the current pandemic. Moreover, the conditions in which those who survived had to exist – not only starvation but also shelling and bombing, intense cold, and the risk of falling victim to cannibals – in no sense provide a direct comparison to our current travails. But such episodes can still reveal much about human behaviour and resilience from which we can learn, as well as about the appropriateness or otherwise of likening the fight against the coronavirus to a war.

And one comparison can lead to another. Within a decade of the siege of Leningrad being lifted the Soviet leader Stalin was dead, and the search for a new normal for the country was being sought. His eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, wanted to ease the restrictiveness of the Stalinist regime but feared the consequences of relaxing restrictions too quickly and too much. As he put it, he was ‘afraid the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which could drown us’ [2]. Once again, the land of Stalin’s secret police and Gulag camps and our own more limited restrictions on movement and association are not directly comparable, but there may nevertheless be some food for thought in considering the challenges faced not only in maintaining restrictions but also in managing their relaxation. Khrushchev was indeed ousted from power in 1964, but survived long enough to write his memoirs. He is also remembered for his unconventional means of gaining people’s attention [3]. But that is another story.

Footnotes

  1. Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, London: Pan Books, 2000, p.496.
  2. Quoted in Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, p.111
  3. Roy Underhill, Khrushchev’s Shoe and other ways to captivate audiences from one to one thousand, Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000.

Armchair Sociology

A series of short podcasts feature informal conversations on what kind of sociological imaginations might result during the course of these troubling times. ‘Armchair Sociology’ is of course becoming the name of the game, as we all cling to our computers and tablets and wear out our chairs. The idea of an ‘armchair expert’ is often used in a dismissive way of people who don’t do the real thing. But telling apart what is ’real’ sociology and what is armchair sociology has already been under considerable process of reconstruction, and present circumstances are multiplying the changes. See the blog post on ‘What’s happening to sociological imaginations?’ for the kind of topics covered in these conversations.

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