Interdisciplinarity

by Véronique Zanetti (ZiF Bielefeld, Germany),
G. Ary Plonski (UBIAS, IEA Sao Paulo, Brazil)
and Britta Padberg (ZiF Bielefeld, Germany )

When we started the blog series “How will / should the world change?” at the beginning of June, there was still hope that somehow the situation would be improving after the Northern hemisphere summer. Now we have to confront the fact that the opposite is true, especially in the worldwide perspective taken by this series. All the more important we believe are the 24 essays by researchers from 12 countries all around the world that we published during the last weeks.

For us, as editors of this little series, above all, the multiplicity of perspectives turned out to be eye-opening and enriching. The essays dealt with diverse topics such as food supply systems, science denialism, the democratization of scientific knowledge, data privacy, the incapability of nation states to cope with the pandemic, and the uneven gender distribution of the burdens caused by the pandemic.

Masks are required e.g. in France, but Muslim veils remain forbidden; in Hong Kong, wearing masks became a political statement, since the government fears that mask wearing could make the identification of protesters more difficult, as Wai Yip HO (Hong Kong, Paris) pointed out. Aasiya Qadir (Kashmir) and Afroz Shah (Darussalam) made us aware that in many regions of the world, lockdowns and school closings are frequent phenomena due to political conflicts, e.g. in Kashmir.

The essays draw dystopias of a world in which people meet only virtually to avoid infection but also to prevent solidarization of any kind, as sketched by Jose Gracia Bondia (San José, Costa Rica), and utopias “as the best way to overcome the corona crisis”, as evoked by Renato Janine Ribeiro (Sao Paulo, Brazil).

Without doubt, the corona crisis has turned out to be a kind of political stage, spotlighting the problems and opportunities of our societies, as described by Paula Diehl (Kiel, Germany). Some of the essays collected here analyze those problems, but there are also those who see alternative worlds already being thought through and revealed by the pandemic, as in the contribution by Erella Shadmi (Beit Berl, Israel). 

We expected Institutes for Advanced Studies worldwide to be rich pools to fish for visionary ideas and scientific observations concerning the pandemic, and the vast choice of articles following our call more than confirmed our expectation. So, at the end of this little series, facing the “great wide-open future”, which comic strip artist Oliver Grajewksi (Berlin) illustrated for us with his sharpened pen, we would like to cordially thank everybody who has submitted an essay. If this series contributes to widening the perspective on the challenges the pandemic is posing to societies and individuals worldwide and provides a forum for discussing some of the ideas that are currently developed all around the world, our goals have been achieved.

by Paula Diehl, Political Theory, History of Ideas and Political Culture, University of Kiel, Germany

The Stage

The Corona crisis seems to spotlight the problems and opportunities of our representative democracy. It provides a scene on which the shortcomings of our democracy become visible, but also one on which different political discourses and visions of the future can be enacted. In addition to protests, economic, political and social projects enter this stage as well. 

However, this stage is subject to particularly bright lighting. It is a glaring light that makes critical aspects of our representative democracy and capitalist society visible. The bright Corona light has, in particular, illuminated the problems in the health care system. Industrial nations such as Italy, Spain or the USA were facing a collapse of their medical supply. Structural deficits such as undersized capacities of hospitals, insufficient supply of medical materials such as masks, ventilators or medication as well as poorly paid and overwhelmed personnel were laid bare in the pandemic. In Spain and Northern Italy triage was applied, granting only the fittest patients the right to medical treatment. Older and already ill individuals could no longer be guaranteed a hospital bed or the use of a ventilator. The contradictions between biopolitics and democratic rights, which already exist, became exacerbated in the pandemic. In this context, the deadly consequences of an austerity policy caused by the state’s withdrawal from critical infrastructure were also exposed. In nations such as the USA, where there is no universal or mandatory health insurance and inequalities are especially apparent in the health sector, a particular selection takes place. Those who cannot afford medical treatment face the choice of either putting themselves and their families in debt or not being treated. Yet, due to their living and working conditions, they are often risk patients and suffer from diabetes, heart problems or other diseases.^[1] The savings potential in the health care sector and the privatization of primary health care do not pay off in times of a pandemic.   Even worse, they increase the danger of Covid-19. Refrigerated trucks storing corpses in front of New York City hospitals, mass funerals in Brazil or dead bodies lying openly on the streets of Guayaquil provide the grim images of this crisis.

As a result of the pandemic, further vulnerabilities of politics and society are exposed. The shortage of supplies, on the one hand, and the obliteration of groceries, on the other, lay bare the problems of an agriculture that mainly services wholesale markets, focuses on monoculture and is entirely dependent on the transport and logistics sector. Due to the lockdown, considerable amounts of food perished in the field while the consumers, who partly already suffer economically from the Corona crisis, have to pay significantly more for the same products. In Germany alone, the price for vegetables has increased since the beginning of the crisis on average by 26%, in some cases such as zucchini even by 92%. In the US, farmers destroyed or gave away their potatoes, which are grown in huge monocultures, in some cases even 60% of the harvest. In the Netherlands, 13% of the potato production was disposed during the Corona crisis. Milk, eggs and other unprocessed foods were also destroyed. The focus on monocultures and long-distance transportation is not only problematic ecologically, in the case of the pandemic, it is also a risk for the economy and for supplying the population.

A third problem made visible by Corona is the flexibilization of the labor market in an attempt to reduce  labor costs and make businesses more competitive. According to Thomas Piketty, this is one of the most important sources for the increase of social inequalities in Europe. In Germany, the reforms of the Agenda 2010 led to precarious working conditions of many employees and enabled the boom of sub-contractors, a situation that is now at the core of the Corona outbreaks in the meat industry. When in mid-May 2020 twenty-nine Corona cases were discovered in a meat-packing plant in Lower Saxony, and shortly thereafter an even larger outbreak occurred in Rheda-Wiedenbrück near Gütersloh, the deplorable working and living conditions of the mainly Eastern European workers came to light:  unpaid extra working hours and packed housing with mouldy walls are part of this exploitation system. Such conditions exist in the agricultural sector and cruise ship tourism as well. It was not as if nobody was aware of the precarious working and living conditions of these workers.  They have been criticized for many years, but Corona makes the problem visible and the danger of infections for society imminent.  Again, the pandemic illuminates how unequal our society is. Whether in Paris, Bangladesh, Rio de Janeiro or Gütersloh, the virus spreads especially in places where dense and unhealthy living conditions are predominant, thus among the poor. While for the upper middle class the lockdown provoked a decelaration of everyday life as well as stress relief, inhabitants of the banlieues, favelas and ghettoes in large cities experienced a nightmare.

Crisis scenario and logic of prevention

Yet the crisis of the system was not the only issue that became visible on the Corona stage. Especially during the lockdown, and also later on, the state’s logic of prevention – legitimated by medical and scientific expertise – stood at center stage. States have the minimal obligation to ensure safety and peace. According to Thomas Hobbes, the Leviathan must use all means necessary for this purpose. In modern times, this duty is extended to the preservation of the population’s health. Michel Foucault pointed out this new paradigm when he spoke of biopolitics. In democracy, though, the state has another duty: it needs to guarantee the fundamental rights and liberties of each individual. Security (Hobbes) and administration of life (Foucault), on the one hand, and the democratic guarantee of fundamental rights and liberties, on the other, stand in tension to each other. A democratic state must not, like the Leviathan, make use of all means, and its biopolitical measures are counterbalanced by human rights and ethics. Checks and balances, mass media and citizens’ fundamental rights limit the power of the state. Decisions have to pass parliamentary committees and are discussed in public. However, in an extreme situation there is no time for this. The state has to act quickly, and this action shifts the balance of power in favour of the Leviathan and biopolitics. The state now functions within the mode of prevention, which is legitimized by the imminent catastrophe made plausible by the crisis scenario. 

Continue reading “The Corona Crisis as a Political Stage”

by José Gracia Bondia, Physics, University of Costa Rica

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned” (W. B. Yeats, 1920)

“COVID-19 was the lightning before the thunder” (P. Khanna & K. Khemka, 2020).

1. The bare facts

1a. A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

SARS-Cov-2 is not at all like the agents of the “common cold”. Bigger, much more contagious, endowed with a many-in-one ability for wrecking havoc in different organs and functions of the human body, this virus is the stuff of nightmares. Well-informed scientists have argued that it evolved from bats to human hosts by natural processes; and that remains the most likely hypothesis. This does not negate that Wuhan houses the most advanced-level laboratories devoted to experiments with viruses in China. And that those experiments try to augment the toxicity of the pathogen and its ability to enter body cells. Both American officials and Chinese diplomats have engaged in the blame game about the zero-point of corona. Something is certain: “infodemics” is here to stay.

There were plenty of Cassandras, to be sure. “The coming plague” and many other works were easily prescient. To no avail: politicians do not deal in likely future risks. The prestigious Center of Disease Control at Atlanta used to be the spearhead of the fight against epidemics the world over. Barely propelled during the Obama Administration, and starved of funds by the current one, it made a botch in the present emergency.

1b. The answers to the pandemic: under the Eurocentric lens

Amidst the gallop of the white horse of Pestilence in the West, one could hear a ripping of robes: about the battering that “Third-World” countries were about to suffer.

The reality is more nuanced. Besides the Asiatic “usual suspects”: Taiwan, Hong-Kong, South Korea, China itself… New Zealand is being hailed as the shiny example of containment. As of late May, it had had around 1,500 certified cases and about 25 five deaths. Now, this iaffluent country is essentially made of two very big, sparsely populated faraway islands, relatively easy to close. Take Costa Rica, with a larger population, crammed into a space smaller by a factor of more than five. What is worse, with porous borders with two hotbeds of coronavirus (Nicaragua’s official figures there are not worth the paper they are written on). Its figures by the same dates: 1,000+ thousand certified cases, 10 deaths (12 at the time of writing). In Africa: Ghana, Rwanda, Botswana… have developed testing kits and impressive strategies, overlooked among the Western fanfare. South Africa deployed high-technology against the virus. Senegal started preparing against the pandemic in January. Vietnam stands apart in the whole world by the number of tests performed by number of inhabitants. It closed its borders already in January. To put matters in perspective: towards the end of April Germany had effected around twelve tests per each detected infection; Vietnam had done by then over 600 (!). No deceases reported. This might seem a bit rich; but certainly there the virus was stopped on its tracks.

My favorite example is Kerala in India. Home to 35 million people (fairly small by Indian continental standards), this state has long being governed by a benign brand of Communism. It enjoys a strong public health system. As soon as late January it started to organize. At some point nearly 170,000 people were quarantined. Kerala is no island, its hinterland is the huge Indian subcontinent, where matters are certainly less tidy. As of mid-May there had been four casualties. For sure, people at Kerala trusted their sanitary authorities after a victorious fight just two years ago against Nipah — a less contagious, but far deadlier virus.

In summary: the main weapon against Corona was speed, that is, political vim and political acumen. When “The Economist” writes that USA is not doing too badly, since its fatalities rates compare with Europe’s of two months ago, something is seriously amiss in the Western perspective. All the big countries in the EU, and a good number of the smaller ones, acted late. As did the WHO itself. (Germany is touted as a partial exception. According to refined “generative” epidemiological models, it was just lucky, i.e., there is an unknown factor.)

Continue reading “The Ways After”

by Wai Yip Ho, Sociology, Islamic Studies, Nantes Institutes for Advanced Study, France, Education University of Hong Kong

France: Obligatory Masks and Observant Muslims

After lifting the national lockdown caused by the outbreak of Covid-19, France made mask-wearing mandatory in public transport and high schools. The new mandate of mask-wearing and social distancing suddenly halts French traditional intimate cheek-kiss ‘la bise’ greetings, while unexpectedly encouraging artistic creativity in designing home-made masks. Nevertheless, the law of 2011 on banning face veiling mostly worn by Muslim women remains unchanged. Apparently, making mask-wearing essential but at the same time banning face veil sounds counter-intuitive and inconsistent. One of the unintended consequences of the outbreak of Covid-19 apparently exposed how the French policy of secularism (laïcité) is excluding veiled Muslim women in the public sphere. The new law of making mask-wearing obligatory to contain the spread of virus but upholding the Republic’s values of uncovering the face in public places reveals a new social ambiguity. As a result of the new era of relative normlessness (Emile Durkheim’s notion of ‘Anomie’) after the outbreak of Covid-19, it initiates the French society negotiating new practices of interpersonal intimacy and social distancing. Most importantly, the new social condition opens an uncharted path and platform of dialogue in pursing common values, identity and social solidarity in France.

Hong Kong: Self-Defence and State Surveillance

After the intense street conflicts between protestors and police over the controversial Extradition Bill, the outbreak of the pandemia spreading from Wuhan was an additional challenge for Hong Kong. Haunted by the nightmare of the SARS virus causing 286 deaths in 2003 plus social distrust to government’s initial guideline of mask-wearing being unnecessary, civil society transformed the painful lessons into a quick collective self-defence practice of mask-wearing. Hong Kong even takes pride along Taiwan to be counted as one of the successful Asian examples in subduing Covid-19. But the key factor of success largely attributes to the voluntary mask-wearing of civil society. Despite mask-wearing is proved effective in containing spreading of the virus, Hong Kong High Court surprisingly maintains prohibiting mask-wearing on the grounds of preventing masked radical protestors from vandalizing the city, as the government imposed an emergency law banning protestors wearing masks in public demonstrations. But for many protestors, the voluntary practice of mask-wearing is both: self-protection from the virus, but also a symbolic stand against state surveillance. Many protestors were wearing masks, and some of them deliberately destroyed street smart lamp posts, because they suspect that biometric data collected by the installed facial recognition technology enabling to identify protectors’ identity would be send back to the Chinese central government.

After the Covid-19 Crisis: Bringing Humanity towards ‘Brave New Normal’

In this short essay, it is through briefly illustrating the cases of France and Hong Kong how authorities conflictingly approve the necessity of a generalized use of masks in containing the spike of Covid-19 and at the same time de-legitimize mask-wearing when it poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the state’s rule. The rigidity and failure of the WHO and of governments in swiftly containing the virus outbreak leads to social distrust, liberating global civil society’s creativity and flexibility to react. The lack of clear agreed social norms or even contradictory claims of mask-wearing implies the new social condition of normlessness. As the protesting slogan in Chile, ‘No volveremos a la normalidad, porque’ la normalidad era el problema’ (‘We won’t return to normality, because normality was the problem’) suggests, the French society initiates a journey of soul-searching in seeking how to bring together the new intimate distance and the Republic’s values after the outbreak of Covid-19, whereas in Hong Kong protestors have identified a protest logic of ‘Be Water’ in new social solidarity through mask-wearing in resistance against state surveillance.

In conclusion, after the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis there will be no reverse to normal. It awakens humanity in transition from normality to the indeterminate challenges of a ‘Brave New Normal’.

* This short reflection piece is to acknowledge and express my gratitude to the invitation as the Fellow of the 3rd UBIAS Intercontinental Academia (ICA3) – Laws: Rigidity and Dynamics (2018-19) at Singapore, Princeton and Birmingham.

by Stoyan V. Sgourev, Management Department, ESSEC Business School, Paris

The Covid-19 crisis is a rare event with large social and economic consequences that will most likely exceed what the optimists are expecting, but not be nearly as dramatic as what the pessimists predict. Human history is an incessant sequence of crises that shape the evolution of societies, but the effect is never detached from the past. Societies, cultures or economies mutate in an evolutionary process that major disruptions accelerate, presenting new challenges and opportunities.

The crisis will have short- and long- term consequences on a range of social domains and economic sectors. The short-term consequences are related to the need to manage the easing of the restrictions, the necessity to maintain social distancing, or the expected drop in consumption that will profoundly affect the prospects of sectors dependent on physical presence, such as tourism, culture or education. For many, especially smaller, organizations, the aftermath of the crisis will pose difficult questions related to survival and the need to reduce budget shortfalls. Governments will have an active role to play at this stage, though this role is naturally constrained by the reduced tax revenue. As economists are already warning, cranking up the money printing press can help maintain employment and prop up viable businesses in the short run, but is perilous in the long run, given the inflationary pressure it generates and elevated rates of indebtedness. Juggling between these contrasting imperatives is the new normality for governments. Elected on promises of sustained growth and lower unemployment, they are now facing the need to manage the opposite scenario – of rising unemployment, a slowing economy, and a pervasive expectation that things will get worse before they get better. This is what deep, penetrating crises do – they change convictions, invert perspectives and reinforce contradictions that up to now appeared manageable.

The cultural sector illustrates well this development. The crisis is making resurface anxieties about the role of technology, the physical experience of culture and the viability of funding models. Forcing adaptation to the exigencies of social distancing, the crisis will accelerate the digitalization of the cultural sector, overhaul funding models, reduce the dependence on physical presence and create a momentum for scaling up. Accustomed to resolving operational bottlenecks, company directors will need to conceive of new ways to hedge risks and to reduce the uncertainty related to sanitary threats.

Our collective experiences during the crisis confirmed that culture is indispensable in times of ordeal, but that it is more fragile than we think. This reminds of how cultural life helped societies cope during the Second World War and rebuild in its aftermath. However, the postwar years also underlined the insufficiency of the economic and social fabric that sustained culture. The declining personal fortunes of aristocratic patrons and rapidly increasing labor costs triggered the search for a new equilibrium: if the European societies started heavily subsidizing their cultural economy, the United States shifted the finding responsibility to the private and non-profit sectors.

Continue reading “Digital Culture Around the “Globe””

by Wagner Costa Ribeiro, Institute of Advanced Studies and School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences, São Paulo, Brazil

Within the current international scenario, the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are the multilateral institutions that are best suited to develop cooperative actions necessary to combat the pandemic and its effects for the future. A future that will need to be different from the conditions that led to the emergence and proliferation of the pandemic.

This paper addresses, on the basis of UN and WHO actions, how multilateralism can be an alternative for the organization of social relations in the 21st century, at different scales, after the outbreak of Covid-19. Initially, we present part of the initiatives of the two multilateral organizations mentioned and then we analyze how Latin America and the European Union are walking paths of cooperation in the search for ways out of the crisis.

On January 30, 2020 – which some considered somewhat late – the WHO presented the Declaration of Public Health Emergency of International Importance when treating the disease and soon afterwards launched a plan of action (WHO, 2020). It was not the recognition of the pandemic, which occurred more than a month later, on March 11.

This delay is one of the focuses of criticism towards the WHO. For example, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, accused the slow declaration of the pandemic, which, for him, allowed a greater geographical dispersion of the virus. On May 29, he announced the break with WHO, two days after the WHO presented a manifesto in which it stated that it was necessary to go beyond returning to normal and seek new ways of organizing life and the economy in line with nature and in favor of quality of life (WHO, 2020a). Meanwhile, the WHO argued that neither the virus nor its ability to transmit was sufficiently known. This is still a matter for debate. Perhaps in the future we will have more documents that will allow us to say what actually happened. But there is no doubt that the delay in recognizing the pandemic has allowed the globalization process and intense flows of people, products and materials to continue, which has caused the virus to spread across continents.

Once the pandemic was recognized, the WHO began to develop a series of actions, often in coordination with the UN. We will present part of the activities that these international institutions have developed to fight the disease in a chronological way.

The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, in March spoke for the necessary cooperation between countries to seek alternatives to fight the disease. On March 28, the UN launched a Global Humanitarian Response Plan (UN, 2020), based on a demand from the WHO, which was initially budgeted at 2.1 billion dollars. Quickly, the budget more than tripled: by May 2020, it was 6.7 billion dollars. Who will provide this funding? Unfortunately, the multilateral agencies are emptying out. This raises another important question: why was the international system not prepared to face a crisis like this?

Continue reading “Post-Covid and Multilateralism”

by Renato Janine Ribeiro, Philosophy, University of São Paulo, Brazil

The coronavirus crisis shows us Utopia is more necessary than ever. By Utopia I mean a society whose main aims will be happiness and fairness (the latter may be synonymous with social justice). A series of public policies and social values must thus be redefined. First of all we must seriously limit consumerism. It is strongly responsible for the destruction of the environment. Some serious studies recently suggested that as we humans have been raising our standard of living we have also destroyed the borders between ourselves and nature, especially the wilderness. The hypothesis that the present pandemics originated from humans eating bats in Wuhan is quite symbolic: the habitat of animals, including wild ones, would have been occupied and even devastated by man. The balance between mankind and nature has been jeopardized. Concerning food we know grains are healthier than meat, and require less water and other nutrients, but we do not change our daily fare to make it less environmentally expensive.

Obviously this way of human life cannot last. As the Earth has presently the largest human population of its history, and these billion of humans eat and consume more than ever, the planet is strongly stressed: it is possible that illnesses of various sorts constitute one of the self-defense reactions of the living organism we call our planet.

More than one thinker has said the most dangerous animal on the Earth is man. If nature attacks us it could be a counter-attack, meaning the Earth tries to save itself from human aggression. So we need to stop our war against nature. We must consider our planet as our home, not as a stock of merchandise we can dispose of at will. It is to be cherished, not to be plundered.

Actually, there is no major distinction between our behavior towards the poor and towards nature. Plentifulness is attained at the cost of both destroying the planet and despoiling the poorest humans. To be sure, we should not consider mankind as homogeneous. Since millennia it has been strongly hierarchical. The haves always got a lot from the have-nots. In the last time, be it the two centuries and a half since the democratic revolutions of the late 18th century, be it the 70 last years since World War II, however, there has been a strong movement towards equality. But this has also implied that everybody has been trying to consume as much as the rich. We should understand it is impossible. So we should commit ourselves to a serious of important changes.

Continue reading “Utopia as the Best Way to Overcome the Corona Crisis”

by Ulisses Barres de Almeida, Brazilian Center for Physics Research, Brazil, and Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK,
Daniel Fachin Soares, Economist, CFA, CQF
Marina Massimi, Psychology, Institute of Advance Studies of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and
Ana Lydia Sawaya, Physiology, Instituteof Advance Studies, University of São Paulo, Bazil, and UBIAS

CONTEXT

The COVID-19 Pandemic has confronted our global society with a condition frequently seen as superseded: that of humanity’s frailty. The enormous technological achievements have imparted us with a notion of progress that bestowed on humankind a position of near-lordship over the natural world, and nourished a generalized perception that solutions of a technical nature could alone hold the key for human progress and betterment¹. Such self-conscience has proved resilient in face of the direst forecasts concerning climate change, and even the boldest past warnings of a biological threat such as we are now experiencing. But our common life experience over the past months, which has unified the globe in unprecedented ways around a common challenge, not only contested such view, but reinforced the perception of some fundamental systemic fragilities. The numerous challenges that governments and societies are facing in tackling the coronavirus, and the threats that the Pandemic has further imposed to globalization and international cooperation, clearly show that the role of science as a response to crisis is limited in face of a socioeconomic disarrangement that increasingly cripples the potential gains of technical action.

Scientific and technological progress are per se incapable to answer to our common global challenges and produce resilient societies for the XXI century. Comparative moral and humanitarian progress, which must translate into a renewed socioeconomic organization, are necessary² to: (i) sustain democracies that can endure the regular assaults of populism and extremism, (ii) build a fairer capitalism, that can guarantee jobs and justly value all kinds of work, thus safeguarding a dignifying existence to all citizens, (iii) promote a truly humanist and scientific culture that is resilient in face of ideological impositions, and can both respect and promote people’s freedom and traditions.

Despite a reduction of global poverty³, and generally improving international cooperation, Western Society was not able to match those developments by a sense of responsibility towards others. Growing numbers of people are being excluded from the social tapestry, generating resentment from populations and a generalized lack of trust in governmental leadership, which is seen as lacking of moral authority⁴. In fact, the unprecedented levels of social inequality⁵ are fundamentally incompatible with healthy and stable democracies. The Pandemic has further exposed the weaknesses of a system where decision-taking and power to act are ever more distant from ordinary people and daily life. Entire states find themselves at times effectively subdued amidst a perverse dynamic where predatory corporate environments shifts power from people and their elected representatives to companies worth more than most sovereign states⁶.

Continue reading “Strengthening of community life as basis for a renewed humanism for the XXI Century”

by Adam F. Kola, Center of Excellence IMSErt, Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland

Our memory is a sign of the past. Collective or social memory stores what has passed and for some reason is vital to the community. As such, the politics of memory¹ is a tool of political struggle and social engineering. Undeniably, the collective memory of humanity will keep the coronavirus pandemic in its resources. In some countries or regions, it will become an essential element of building a community. It will be so in the memory of those living in the age of COVID-19, it will also survive in the next generations—in the form of post-memory² or social traces of disease preserved in works of art. It will also become an essential element of scientific development. It seems that never before in history such great resources have been allocated for one scientific and social purpose at the same time³. Even the most significant military projects, with the Manhattan Project at the forefront, cannot compare to this. Nor have so many scientists ever switched their activities on a global scale just to make COVID-19 collapse, as well as to seek a remedy for illness, economic crisis, social and mental problems. There is no room here to talk about the inequalities that the pandemic has uncovered, but their scale is overwhelming.

Can memory studies do something today in the context of the coronavirus pandemic? Is there any sense in reaching for tools and conceptualisations developed within their framework? Can we think about memory for the future? Are the memory studies helpful here?

The most apparent lead would be to document what is happening around us. To study the process of remembering, and in later yearsforgetting or continually changing the memory of the pandemic. One can also study the memory and post-memory (memory of the next generations) of previous epidemics that affected humanity and look at what they left behind in our community⁴. Both tasks are now performed. There are teams of scholars and journalists who collect, document, describe⁵.

However, let us reach back into the past, not so far away as to give an important example, which today seems clear, and which shapes our reality in the days of pandemic and lockdown. In the memory of most adults two situations are still alive. The first is 9/11—the terrorist attack in the United States in 2001, symbolised by the destruction of the WTC Twin Towers. The second event was the crisis of 2008. They are crucial elements of the still active memory of people living in the world today. The intensity is different; the degree of impact varies. Because although the attacks took place in the United States, with New York as the most affected by their effects—not only practically, but also symbolically—the sight of skyscrapers collapsing has written itself—in the memory of all those who saw it. Mostly on TV screens, but still they saw it. However, the image is duplicated today.

Continue reading “Memory Studies for the Future. Remembering (COVID-19) as Survival Value”

by Rinaldo Rossi, Geography, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

Urbanization is a global phenomenon, as it is a basis of contemporary spatialization of society, settled on big cities and on their integrated networks spread throughout the countryside. As the United Nations’ data shows, more than two-thirds of global population have been forecast to live in urban areas by 2050, up to 56% more than today’s rate.

Therefore, the coronavirus crisis has a close relationship with worldwide urbanization, which creates conditions for generation and spread of multiple zoonosis. Since the first COVID-19 case registered in the mega-city of Wuhan (December 2019), the contamination’s path was clearly observed as attached to human flow across great urban centers in the world, occurring the disease’s “jump of scales”. Countryside population faces great risks with the spread of the COVID-19 disease, especially in regions with precarious health-care systems; still, cities are the starting point for hierarchical contamination and the head challenge for social isolation policies.

Over the past decades, a significant number of deaths related to zoonosis had lighted a warning sign on cities’ food supply systems, mostly based on extreme conditions of animal confinement or management that favor biological mutation, environmental impacts, and health damage. During coronavirus crisis, urban citizens from all over the world are questioning their way of life; some analysts even play with Horace’s and Russeau’s notion of “fugere urbem”, to speak of the rich famous families movement towards their vacation houses on countryside areas as they keep on working from their “home offices”. Stereotypes aside, many citizens, now deprived of urban parks or beaches, started looking after their own gardens.

It is unknown how the perspectives emerged during the current quarantine will affect cities post COVID-19, but certainly they should continue to play a great role on societies’ spatialization. On the other hand, this lockdown period comes as a great window to rethink urban space and food industry.

Urban agriculture: not an exotic solution

There is a modern myth, shaped during industrialization, about a natural apartheid between city and agriculture. This principle emerged upon post 19th century scientific society, describes the city, stating dualism as bedrock of scientific study of social and spatial concepts, diffusing a thesis on incompatibility between food production and modern spatial form.

Paraphrasing M. Castells, industrialization built a false myth of an “urban culture”¹, where, supposedly, people are not even concerned about where their food comes from. There is some truth to the statement that capitalist economies tend to push food production out of the city’s borders. In truth, the history of cities, in either ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ configurations, indicates a variety of experiences in which agriculture is a relevant function inside city’s limits. Smit, Nasr and Ratta² present hundreds of cases where fresh food production occur in urban or peri-urban areas. For Native American societies, Urban Agriculture (UA) technologies were important. Aztec chinampas (figure 1), Inka terraces and Mayan agrarian urbanism are notable examples.

Some may say UA is common to ‘non-complex societies’, but not applicable to ‘modern societies’, which is a false affirmation, as pictured by industrial pioneer cities of Paris and London. For instance, in the Paris of the 19th century, UA was necessary for food supplying and sanitation, the styles of jardins ouvrier (worker’s gardens) and marais (swamps) fed people and contributed to composting.

Continue reading “Urban agriculture: a new deal on food supply systems?”

by Ana Helena German Drumond, Law, Court of Justice of Minas Gerais, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and Mariana Damiani Santana, Law, Court of Auditors of Minas Gerais, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil

ABSTRACT

The emergence and rapid spread, around the globe, of the new coronavirus imposed suddenly the need to adopt adaptive changes to the new reality. In the legal sphere, the adaptations caused an impact of even greater proportions than in other areas, given that, until now, the resistance of this branch to innovate was notorious. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it imperative to reduce bureaucratization of legal institutions, which is why the present work is aimed at the useful and necessary understanding of the online immersion of Law as well as the possible repercussions of that in the post-pandemic world.

INTRODUCTION

In the midst of the various areas of knowledge that are in constant search for modernization and innovation, it is noticeable that the Law is timid when it comes tomajor changes. The legal world seems, in many ways, to have stopped in time.

Big data, internet of things and artificial intelligence have been slowly introduced into the daily lives of legal professionals. Even though some exceptions were noticed, this was not the rule of pre-pandemic Law.

Nevertheless, the increasing proliferation of COVID-19 worldwide and the need to try to prevent its spread has led to changes in the configuration of social, commercial, and, inevitably, legal relations.

Considering theguaranteeing role of the Judiciary and related entities, which consists in protecting individual and collective rights, paralyzing its activities until the resumption of normalcy was not an option. It was necessary, then, that the Law, previously hardened, despite all resistance, became more flexible and reinvented itself under the new conditions and limitations imposed.

Allying itself with the resources provided by technology, Law has been taking unprecedented forms and the amplification of its immersion in the online world is inevitable. And in this new scenario, issues related to data protection and security, which are even more relevant than before, will determine the success of the new ways of exercising legal techniques, since it will no longer be possible, nor desired, to go back.

DEVELOPMENT

In April 2020, Brazil was surprised by the adoption of an innovative and unprecedented measure: for the first time in history, the Federal Supreme Court held trial sessions via video conference. The sessions werebroadcasted in real time through the Superior Court channel on Youtube. Besides that, the Court allowed pleadings by attorneys, prosecutors and defenders active in the cases being tried, during the video conference¹. The objective was to prevent the jurisdictional assistance from being interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At almost the same time, in May 2020, in Singapore, for the first time in the country’s history, a man was sentenced to death after being put on trial via videoconference, through the Zoom platform.² The measure was also adopted to ensure the safety of those involved in the process, amid the lockdown enacted in Singapore due to the rapid spread of the new coronavirus.

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