With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media's adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come.

Covid-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Responses is one of the first books uniting an international team of scholars to investigate how media address critical social, political, and health issues connected to the 2020-21 COVID-19 outbreak. The book evaluates unique civic challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for media worldwide, exploring pandemic social norms that media promote or discourage, and how media serve as instruments of social control and resistance, or of cooperation and representation. These chapters raise significant questions about the roles mainstream or citizen journalists or netizens play or ought to play, enlightening audiences successfully about scientific information on COVID-19 in a pandemic that magnifies social inequality and unequal access to health care, challenging popular beliefs about health and disease prevention and the role of government while the entire world pays close attention. This book will be of interest to students and faculty of communication studies and journalism, departments of public health, sociology, and social marketing.

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis. Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics, environmentalism, citizens’ rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism, and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship between the various social forces that contributed to the ‘Covid narrative’. The subjects analysed here include: the performance of the ‘mainstream’ media, the quality of political ‘messaging’ and argumentation, the securitised state and racism in Brazil, the growth of ‘catastrophic management’ in UK universities, emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media’s attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public life. Delving beneath established political tropes and state rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described as unprecedented and unique, but was in fact comparable to other major global disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical ‘publics’ pursued their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a host of citizens – from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable – suggested that inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order. Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies, politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, and the sociology of health.

COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.

Populism is on the rise across the globe. Authoritarian populist leaders have taken over and solidified their control over many countries. Their power has been cemented during the global coronavirus pandemic, though perhaps the defeat of populist-in-chief Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election (despite his continuing protestations to the contrary) has seen the start of the waning of this phenomenon? In the UK Brexit is 'done'; Britain is firmly out of the EU; Covid is vaccinated against; and Boris Johnson has a huge parliamentary majority and, despite never-ending problems, of his own and others' making, his grip on power with a parliamentary majority of more than 80, still seems secure. Meanwhile culture wars continue to rage. How has media, worldwide, contributed, fulled or fought this populism. Cheerleaders? Critics? Supplicants? This book examines those questions in 360 degrees with a distinguished cast of authors from journalism and academia.

Timely text authored by leading political communication scholars on the effects of tCovid-19 on political communication. How governments, journalists, and the public communicate is of interest within the disciplines of political science, media studies, communication studies, and journalism.

Why solving the information problem should be at the core of our pandemic response: essential reading about the long-term implications of our current crisis. COVID-19 is caused by a virus. The COVID-19 pandemic is caused by a lack of good information. A pandemic is essentially an information problem: this is the enlightening and provocative idea at the heart of this book. If we solve the information problem, argues economist Joshua Gans, we can defeat the virus. For example, when we don't know who is infected, we have to act as if everyone is infected. If we actively manage the information problem--if we know who is infected and with whom they had contact--we can suppress the virus or buy time for vaccine development. This is an expanded version of an eBook originally published as Economics in the Age of COVID-19.

As an unprecedented global pandemic sweeps the planet, who better than the supercharged Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to uncover its deeper meanings, marvel at its mind-boggling paradoxes and speculate on the profundity of its consequences? We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Žižek, a new form of communism – the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism – may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. Written with his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H. G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx), Žižek provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.

Digital humour in the COVID-19 pandemic: Perspectives from the Global South offers a groundbreaking intervention on how digital media were used from below by ordinary citizens to negotiate the global pandemic humorously. This book considers the role played by digital media during the pandemic, and indeed in the socio-political life of the Global South, as indispensable and revolutionary to human communication. In many societies, humour not only signifies laughter and frivolity, but acts as an important echo that accompanies, critiques, questions, disrupts, agitates and comments on societal affairs and the human condition. This book analyses citizens’ use of social media and humour to mediate the pandemic in a diverse range of countries, including Brazil, India, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe. The book will appeal to academics and students of media and communication studies, political studies, rhetoric, and to policy makers.

Pandemics are disruptive. Thus, there is a need to prepare and plan actions in advance for identifying, assessing, and responding to such events to manage uncertainty and support sustainable livelihood and wellbeing. A detailed assessment of a continuously evolving situation needs to take place, and several aspects must be brought together and examined before the declaration of a pandemic even happens. Various health organizations; crisis management bodies; and authorities at local, national, and international levels are involved in the management of pandemics. There is no better time to revisit current approaches to cope with these new and unforeseen threats. As countries must strike a fine balance between protecting health, minimizing economic and social disruption, and respecting human rights, there has been an emerging interest in lessons learned and specifically in revisiting past and current pandemic approaches. Such approaches involve strategies and practices from several disciplines and fields including healthcare, management, IT, mathematical modeling, and data science. Using data science to advance in-situ practices and prompt future directions could help alleviate or even prevent human, financial, and environmental compromise, and loss and social interruption via state-of-the-art technologies and frameworks. Data Science Advancements in Pandemic and Outbreak Management demonstrates how strategies and state-of-the-art IT have and/or could be applied to serve as the vehicle to advance pandemic and outbreak management. The chapters will introduce both technical and non-technical details of management strategies and advanced IT, data science, and mathematical modelling and demonstrate their applications and their potential utilization within the identification and management of pandemics and outbreaks. It also prompts revisiting and critically reviewing past and current approaches, identifying good and bad practices, and further developing the area for future adaptation. This book is ideal for data scientists, data analysts, infectious disease experts, researchers studying pandemics and outbreaks, IT, crisis and disaster management, academics, practitioners, government officials, and students interested in applicable theories and practices in data science to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from future pandemics and outbreaks.