ABOUT THIS BOOK

For people and governments around the world, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to place the preservation of human life at odds with the pursuit of economic and social life. Yet this simple alternative belies the complexity of the entanglements the crisis has created and revealed, not just between health and wealth but also around morality, knowledge, governance, culture, and everyday subsistence.

Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade have assembled an eminent team of scholars from across the social sciences, conducting research on six continents, to reflect on the multiple ways the coronavirus has entered, reshaped, or exacerbated existing trends and structures in every part of the globe. The contributors show how the disruptions caused by the pandemic have both hastened the rise of new social divisions and hardened old inequalities and dilemmas. An indispensable volume, Pandemic Exposures provides an illuminating analysis of this watershed moment and its possible aftermath.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Didier Fassin is the James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey and the Annual Chair of Public Health at the Collège de France. He is the author of many books in the fields of medical and political anthropology, including Life: A Critical User’s Manual and Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes. Marion Fourcade is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s and has published widely in the fields of economic sociology, culture, and science and technology.

REVIEWS

"The pandemic should be read as an eye-opening phenomenon, and this is precisely how it is addressed in this outstanding collection."

— Arnaud Orain, author of La Politique du Merveilleux: Une Autre Histoire du Syste`me de Law, 1695-1795

"This balanced and sober exercise provides a long list of very convincing insights to be gained from the first eighteen months of the pandemic."

— Richard Rottenburg, author of Far-Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid

"The vital contribution of this volume is that it insists on specificity. It paints a global picture from the ground up, attending to situated empirical particularities."

— Kaushik Sunder Rajan, author of Pharmocracy: Value, Politics and Knowledge in Global Biomedicine

"Combining sharp theoretical insight with gripping on-the-ground accounts, Pandemic Exposures gifts us with a pathbreaking social analysis of COVID-19's impact. Its formidable editors, Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade, along with an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, artfully decipher the pandemic's paradoxical political, moral, and relational worlds. The book's discoveries will surely shape future research while also captivating all readers eager to understand COVID-19's upheavals."

— Viviana A. Zelizer, author of Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Exposing and Being Exposed
Didier Fassin and Marion Fourcade
Part I. Political Economies
Chapter 1. Meet the New Normal, Same as the Old Normal: The State-Market Balance and Economic Policy Debates After the Pandemic
Ravi Kanbur
Chapter 2. No Epistemological Standstill on Sovereign Debt: The Preservation of the Market Order in Pandemic Times
Benjamin Lemoine
Chapter 3. Ad Hoc Generosity in Times of COVID: A Chronicle of Plights, Hopes, and Deadlocks
Lena Lavinas
Chapter 4. Gifts, Grifts, and Gambles: The Social Logics of the Small Business Administration Relief Loan Programs
Sarah Quinn
Chapter 5. Central Bank Planning for Public Purpose
Benjamin Braun
Chapter 6. Authoritarianism and Pandemics: China, Turkey, and Hungary
Latif Tas
Chapter 7. Stretching Time: COVID and Sudan’s Current Transitions
Rebecca Glade and Alden Young
Part II. Moral Economies
Chapter 8. The Moral Economy of Life in the Pandemic
Didier Fassin
Chapter 9. To Kill or Let Die: How Americans Argue about Life, Economy, and Social Agency
Webb Keane
Chapter 10. Protecting the Elderly or Saving the Economy? Turkey’s Ageist Lockdown Policy during the COVID Pandemic
Basak Can and Ergin Bulut
Chapter 11. Reflections on Mutual Aid
Z. Fareen Parvez
Chapter 12. Carceral Contagion: Prisons And Disease
Wendy Warren
Part III. Everyday Economies
Chapter 13. Agricultural Day Labor in Spain: The Logics of (Pandemic) Capitalism
Susana Narotzky
Chapter 14. Making a Living, Resisting Collapse, Building the Future: Livelihood in Times of Pandemic and Lockdown
Isabelle Guérin, Nithya Joseph, and G. Venkatasubramanian
Chapter 15. Crisis as Preexisting Condition: Yemen Between Cholera, Coronavirus, and Starvation
Nathalie Peutz
Chapter 16. Searching for Life in Times of Pandemic
Federico Neiburg and Handerson Joseph
Part IV. Knowledge Economies
Chapter 17. The Great Online Migration: COVID and the Platformization of American Public Schools
Marion Fourcade
Chapter 18. “CBDCs Mean Evolution, Not Revolution”: Central Bank Digital Currencies in the Time of COVID
Horacio Ortiz
Chapter 19. Modeling Pandemic
Fleur Johns
Chapter 20. The Pandemic Economy of Face Masks: From Critical Shortage to Fashion Accessory and Political Statement
Virág Molnár
Chapter 21. COVID and the Death Drive of Toxic Individualism
Ed Cohen