Life in the Time of COVID-19. Disasters, Resilience, and Future http://elea.unisa.it/xmlui/handle/10556/4767 2026-05-07T18:25:58Z 2026-05-07T18:25:58Z De Marchi, Bruno http://elea.unisa.it/xmlui/handle/10556/4786 2025-08-01T07:07:22Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Societal Vulnerability and Resilience in the COVID-19 Crisis De Marchi, Bruno Despite the possibility of a pandemic had been seriously considered in professional circles, most governments were taken by surprise by the rapid diffusion of the SARS CoV-2, from first reports in China (December 2019) to the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic by the WHO (11th March 2020). The same was true for the majority of citizens, unfamiliar with the word pandemic and its meaning. The nightmare scenario of a collapse of the health services and its consequences led to the adoption of measures that impacted very heavily on peoples’ daily lives and required great efforts of adaptation with a high toll on the econom-ic, social and cultural spheres. The paper focuses on some of the major vulnerabilities hig-hlighted by the crisis, from the limited knowledge on the virus and the pandemic to the many uncertainties regarding the response of the human systems and their capacity to cope. Some positive short-term responses are identified, while long-term resilience remains doubtful, including the stability of democratic processes.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Mangone, Emiliana Zyuzev, Nikolay http://elea.unisa.it/xmlui/handle/10556/4785 2025-08-01T07:07:41Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Everyday Life “Turned upside Down”: Disasters, Future and Resilience Mangone, Emiliana; Zyuzev, Nikolay Disasters change individuals and the social structure. Two categories are essential to study disasters: time and space. To these, we should add risk that is a cultural object resulting from interpretation. Its representations are subjective and they stem from the socio-cultural framework of reference. In the article, we will apply to the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy the four risk-related issues emerging by the interplay between the degree of knowledge (certain/uncertain) and that of consent (contested/complete) as in Douglas and Wildavsky. We will describe the four types of problems about the evaluation of the consequences con-cerning this health risk and we will consider the role of institutions. Since disasters disrupt the regularity and predictability of everyday life, the temporal dimension individuals ex-perience is flattened onto the present. Our conclusions reflect on the possibility to counter-act this and on available tools to foresee when constructing a future after a disaster.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Barbieri, Andrea Salvatore Antonio http://elea.unisa.it/xmlui/handle/10556/4784 2025-08-01T07:07:52Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Men and Death in the West.Towards a New Interpretive Paradigm? Barbieri, Andrea Salvatore Antonio Up until recently, contemporary Western society seemed to voluntarily ignore death, wrap-ping itself in a silent cocoon. Death disappeared from the public discourse unless it was spectacularised and mediatised. While ‘true’ death receded from individual lives, ‘fake’ death was omnipresent – widespread and thus anesthetising. After being one of the great taboos of our time, it is now becoming visible again. Three aspects, which can be framed as individual civil rights, have promoted this change: bioethics (which forced the public to ponder challenging topics), cultural pluralisation (which introduced novel ways of thinking and experiencing death) and a tendency towards the creation of institutions attentive to a new humanisation of death(e.g. pandemics give rise to pandethics, with the need to harmo-nize individual and community rights).We are perhaps at the beginning of a cultural turning point, though punctuated with many ambivalences and contradictions. To better understand it, we should look at its antecedents and at the history of the death-related imaginary in the West. We will consider Ariès (1975) schematization of four subsequent phases in societal attitude towards death and hypothesize the beginning of a fifth stage: death postponedbut also rediscovered (even if not yet truly reconciled).

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Simonova, Olga http://elea.unisa.it/xmlui/handle/10556/4783 2025-08-01T07:08:03Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Future of our Feelings: Sociological Considerations about Emotional Culture in Pandem Simonova, Olga The article is devoted to some aspects of the emotional culture of the late modern society, which will evidently undergo changes due to the new virus pandemic. The author draws on the opportunities that belong to the sociology of emotions, because emotions by their nature and function are related to overcoming of uncertainty of the future. The purpose of this essay is to review the main imperatives and contradictions of the emotional culture, identify some feelings that are a socially “sensitive” answer to the current circumstances. The future changes will probably become clearer, if we observe how the contradictions of the modern emotional culture will be resolved; for example, what development the simultaneous “emotionalization” and rationalization of social life will undergo. In the situation of crisis connected to the pandemic all the feelings will be involved, emotional norms and strategies of emotion management will be modified. The author believes that the moral individualism of modern societies will draw attention to the matters concerning social solidarity and moral guidelines, which could be viewed through the concepts of care, human sufferings and feelings that lie at their heart: anxiety and fear for other people, empathy, sympathy and compassion.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z