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Yearly Archives: 2020

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  • 4 Jun 2020
    David Harker

    Uncertainty in a Pandemic

    So much about COVID-19 seems uncertain. When will a vaccine be widely available and how many will refuse it? What’s the infection fatality rate? To what extent are we undercounting, or over-counting, the number of infections and deaths? Can the virus spread from contaminated surfaces? How risky is it to use public transportation or go […]

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  • 4 Jun 2020
    Dániel Z. Kádár, Juliane House

    Interactional Rituals: Ritual and the moral order – Why is social distancing offensive?

    Why do societies and groups of people develop rituals? The answer is to ‘encode’ rights and obligations in particular social relationships, and also to acquire interactional patterns through which our relationships are reinforced or altered. Take greeting as an example. In certain relationships we are supposed to ritually greet one another, and in some relationships […]

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  • 4 Jun 2020
    Theodore W. Cohen

    Mexico and the African Diaspora

    This year, Mexico will determine how many of its citizens identify as Afro-Mexican in its 2020 census. Previously, the federal government had only asked about the nation’s African heritage with an intercensal survey conducted in 2015, when 1.4 million people claimed cultural or ancestral roots in Africa. The last five years sit in stark contrast […]

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  • 4 Jun 2020
    Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser

    Trump’s populism and the pandemic game over U.S. democracy

    The coming to power of Donald Trump has sparked heated debate between pundits and academics about the consequences of right-wing populism in the United States and beyond. Although there’s little doubt that Trump’s populism represents a democratic threat, at the same time there’s no agreement on the extent to which US democracy is strong enough […]

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  • 4 Jun 2020
    Thomas Allen

    Viral Literature in Time

    “In YOU the Virus of TIME began!” So declares the Angel to Prior Walter in Tony Kushner’s 1992 play Perestroika (part two of Angels in America). When Prior receives this message, he finds himself, like many of us today, entrapped in a strange interregnum in which the normal, quotidian passage of time appears to have […]

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  • 3 Jun 2020
    Lyn Innes

    COVID-19 and British Rule

    A friend in India has shared this notice on Facebook: ‘The British people are finally experiencing what’s it like to have the British rule your country.’ During the past ten weeks I have spent my mornings writing about my great-grandfather, the last Nawab of Bengal, and the confinement– albeit luxurious–he experienced under British rule. Lest […]

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  • 3 Jun 2020
    Angela Wright

    Gothic and the Hermeneutics of Isolation

    Again, if e’er she walks abroad, Of course you bring some wicked lord, Who with three ruffians snaps his prey, And to a castle speeds away; There, close confined in haunted tower, You leave your captive in his power, Till dead with horror and dismay, She scales the walls and flies away. (Mary Alcock, ‘A Receipt for Writing a Novel’ in Poems […]

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  • 3 Jun 2020
    Karen Stollznow

    Disease and Discrimination

    The emergence and spread of COVID-19 has led to increased discrimination against Asian people, and specifically led to anti-Chinese prejudice. The virus is believed to have originated in a wet market in Wuhan, China, in 2019. This has inspired some people to brand it “the Wuhan virus”, “the Chinese virus”, or even the “Kung flu.” […]

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