Products and services
One reason why Covidiotism attracts so much attention and strong feeling is that social distancing and its violations are strongly related to what the renowned sociologist Erving Goffman has described as the phenomenon of ‘civil inattention’. In modern public spaces, particularly in urban settings, a key interactional ritual is to keep interaction to a minimum. […]
Read More
“I can’t breathe” is the phrase that will define 2020. It captures the fear of the coronavirus that attacks the respiratory system of those who contract it and they were the last words of George Floyd before he died with a police officer’s knee on his neck. They capture the sentiments that drove millions to […]
Read More
A crucial topic in moral philosophy involves the aggregation and comparison of harms and benefits. How many, for instance, minor headaches relieved is worth a single human life? How many people being able to travel 75 miles per hour rather than 70 miles per hour are worth some number of additional car accidents and deaths? […]
Read More
Refugees in lower- and middle-income countries are facing some of the most serious consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. In refugee camps, which have high population densities and thus present a particular challenge for social distancing and self-isolation strategies, international agencies face both funding and logistical challenges in continuing food distribution, whilst also meeting demand for […]
Read More
Before we venture into a detailed analysis of interactional rituals and distance keeping, an interesting phenomenon worth considering is ‘covidiotism’ and its relationship with interactional rituals. People react in different ways to social distancing, with some even creating their own interactional rituals to substitute those removed by social distancing. Many of these people have been […]
Read More
Recently while teaching my Theory of Knowledge class on Zoom I asked the students whether they should believe what they read in the newspapers. Their confident answer was that they should not – newspapers are biased. I expressed surprise. (Not genuine – I’ve been teaching this class since 1988.) Did they think they shouldn’t believe […]
Read More
During the strange week in March that began almost normally and ended with the shuttering of campuses and a series of rushed goodbyes, the students in my course on Kant’s moral philosophy half-jokingly wondered if he might have anything instructive to say about pandemics or social isolation. I pondered the question. There was, I supposed, […]
Read More
The coronavirus pandemic, even as it induces great anxiety and fear over people’s health, is at the same time causing disruption to our societies’ economies on a scale that is perhaps unprecedented. In Italy, at least in the period after World War II, no comparable crisis has been experienced before. For anything like the same […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
