Social sciences#

Ulrich Becker MAE and his research group published a paper titled ‘Protecting livelihoods in the COVID-19 crisis’. In this working paper, the authors examine and compare legal governmental measures in relation to employment, the economy and social protection in Germany, Denmark, England, France and Italy. This paper is part of the Working Papers Law series published by the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. Read more.

Kathrin Golda-Pongratz MAE in her guest article ‘Dignified housing (in times of pandemic and beyond)’ discusses how lockdown during COVID19 pandemic has exposed inequalities and lack of access to adequate housing. This article was first published in Spanish in The Conversation, a network of not-for-profit media outlets that publish news stories written by academics and researchers. Read more

Chris Hann MAE considers the impact of the pandemic on labour mobility, home working and householding, as part of a blog series for COMPAS, the Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society, a research centre at the University of Oxford. Read more.

Wenxuan Hou MAE and others published a paper titled ‘Epidemic Disease and Financial Development’. In this paper the authors look at the impact of epidemics on long-term financial development, using the example of the Tse Tse fly, which spreads an epidemic disease that is harmful to humans and fatal to livestock. Read more.

Mirca Madianou MAE published a paper titled ‘A Second-Order Disaster? Digital Technologies During the COVID-19 Pandemic’. She discusses how digital technologies and data practices in response to COVID-19 have deepened social inequalities in the already disproportionately affected Black, Asian, minority ethnic, and working class groups. This article was published in Social Media + Society. Read more.

In a paper entitled ‘Imagined Communities and Imaginary Plots: Nationalisms, Conspiracies, and Pandemics in the Longue Durée’, Siniša Malešević MAE considers the nature of and role played by conspiracy theories during the outbreak of major pandemics. He looks at both the historical context and the current COVID-19 crisis. Read more.

Pille Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt MAE published a paper titled ‘The ways of knowing the pandemic with the help of prompted autoethnography’. This article discusses how different forms of autoethnographic production prompted by diverse forms of academic self-expression can lead to different types of knowing. The author discusses her own reflections of motherhood, self-care, and performance in academia. This paper is part of the Massive_Microscopic project, where participants responded to 21 different prompts inviting autoethnographic reflections about COVID-19 global pandemic. Read more.

In a paper titled ‘Pandemics and Politics’, Adam Roberts MAE discusses how during a Pandemic, trust in leadership is essential because measure to control the disease from spreading require individual sacrifice for the social good. The author looks at pandemics historical context and the current COVID-19 crisis. Read more.

Jeroen van den Bergh MAE wrote an analysis article in the Spanish newspaper El Periódico. He argues that Spain can develop an integrated strategy to deal with the coronavirus crisis and promote low-carbon options. He proposes four types of taxes to achieve sustainability. Spain unlike many other European countries does not have a carbon emission tax. Read more

Jeroen van den Bergh MAE, in collaboration with Eric Galbraith, wrote a letter to Nature titled ‘Tax carbon to aid economic recovery’. In their letter they discuss how the fall in fossil-fuel prices offers governments a chance to offset the potentially massive public debt incurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more

In his article titled ‘COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, and the “Spanish flu”: historical moments and social transformations’, Peter Wagner MAE reflects on the possibility that the COVID-19 crisis could trigger major and desirable social change.

This article is a part of the Thesis Eleven online project: Living and Thinking Crisis.
Read more.

Peter Wagner MAE reflects on the development of knowledge and COVID-19 in an essay on the platform Soziopolis, an online platform for sociology and its related disciplines. Read more [in German].

Peter Wagner MAE participated in the symposium Social World and Pandemic. The event was a joint initiative of the journal Sociologia & Antropologia, the Brazilian Society of Sociology and the Social Thought Virtual Library Blog (BVPS in Portuguese).

In his blog piece on the website of the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Roberto Casati MAE considers temporal factors and decision-making in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more [in French].

Pearl Dykstra MAE, Deputy Chair of the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, is one of the authors of an essay entitled ‘Understanding the effects of Covid-19 through a life course lens’. The paper draws on collective expertise to explore the implications of the pandemic for life transitions and trajectories, including the future development of policies and data. The domains considered cover health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. Read more.

SAPEA Food-based webinar series. The first of the series of webinars discussed changes of consumers’ attitudes towards food as a public good instead of as a commodity. It confronted the conclusions of the SAPEA report with the challenges and changes observed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Recording of the webinar available.