[Commlist] Call for papers: Covid-19 as a Global Crisis - International Journal of Cultural Studies

International Journal of Cultural Studies – Call For Papers

*Special Issue: Covid-19: The cultural constructions of a global crisis*

Issue Editors: Myria Georgiou (LSE) and Paul Frosh (Hebrew University of 
Jerualem)

What is the meaning of the coronavirus pandemic as a global crisis? Or, 
to unpack this somewhat naïve question: what does such a crisis feel, 
look likeand signify to those living through it? How are its legibility, 
coherence and significance /as/ a ‘crisis’ constructed and performed 
across highly variable cultural and social contexts? How does its 
occurrence maintain, amplify or transform cultural practices, 
representational repertoires, solidarities and power relations? And how 
can inquiry into something as vast, multifarious and pervasive as the 
pandemic generate new theory about the cultural construction of ‘crisis’ 
in our time - particularly since, at the moment of writing, it is still 
going on? In short, how might we address both the intensely particular 
manifestations of Covid-19 in different locations, times and 
populations, and yet grasp its totality as a global phenomenon?

Calling the pandemic a ‘crisis’ draws it firmly into the orbit of 
cultural studies in three primary ways, which can be summarized through 
three interconnected questions: how is Covid-19 constructed /as/ a 
crisis? what it is a crisis /of/? and /through/ what cultural agencies 
is it produced and reproduced?

*How is Covid-19 constructed /as/ a crisis? *At least one tradition of 
cultural studies, associated with the work of Stuart Hall, placed 
notions of ‘crisis’ and ‘the conjuncture’ at the centre of its concerns. 
A key question here is how to theorize and investigate Covid-19 in 
relation to these terms. In particular, if modernity as such is 
understood as a period in which crisis is endemic and ongoing, as a 
permanent state of affairs where catastrophe and transformation are 
immanent and always /about to/ occur, what then distinguishes a crisis 
like Covid-19 as a distinctive irruptive /event/? If, as Janet Roitman 
has suggested, the term ‘crisis’ has been inflated to the point of 
ubiquity in writings about a range of conditions (economic crisis, 
environmental crisis, political crisis, humanitarian crisis, social 
crisis, etc.), and ‘is mobilized as the defining category of historical 
situations, past and present’ (2014:3), then what – compared to all of 
these other crises - makes Covid-19 distinctively, and exceptionally, 
/critical/? And how is such an event experienced, performed, and 
represented in its exceptional character to the billions of people 
caught up in it?

*What is Covid-19 a crisis /of/? *For many people, Covid-19 is a 
personal crisis of life and death, debilitating illness, and 
bereavement. For many others, it is a social calamity and source of 
collective trauma in their communities and cities. And for most, it is a 
deeply destabilizing condition of work and livelihood insecurity at 
present and for years to come. Thus, Covid-19 is far more than a 
large-scale public health emergency. It has**exposed the usually 
unnoticed structures, hierarchies and norms of everyday lifeworlds and 
socio-political formations at multiple and intersecting scales, from the 
individual body (which becomes subject to increasingly intensive 
monitoring), to the social and political body (which becomes subjected 
to deepening collective surveillance), while also generating new and 
renewed solidarities across local, national and global spaces. Moreover, 
Covid-19 appears to constitute a /meta-crisis/ which enables the 
widespread visibility of /other crises/ and conflicts which were already 
endemic in different parts of the world: crises of wealth and welfare 
inequality, scientific expertise, knowledge and truth (the ‘infodemic’), 
political leadership, racial discrimination, mediation and civility, 
migration and borders, religious conflict and environmental disaster. It 
is a crisis of the universality of risk, its inequitable distribution 
across populations and places, and of our (in)capacity to develop a 
politics capable of addressing it. It is experienced by and represented 
to billions of people as a time of immense danger, disruption and 
potential change, both for their individual lives and for their 
collective ways of life. Perhaps the question to be addressed is, then: 
of what is Covid-19 /not/ a crisis?

*/Through/** what cultural agencies is the crisis produced and 
reproduced? *The catalyzing and transformative potential of pandemics 
for societies is not historically new. What /does/ appear to be novel 
about Covid-19 is its combined pervasiveness and extensiveness. Covid-19 
is /pervasive/ in that its influence plays out at virtually all scales 
of life, from individual physical interactions and personal mobility, to 
relations within and between social and cultural groups, states, 
national economies, the activities of transnational entities such as 
corporations and international organizations, as well as through 
observable shifts in the environmental impact of human behaviour. The 
crisis is /extensive/ not only in that it is experienced, performed and 
represented as a variable /local/ phenomenon in virtually every humanly 
inhabited part of the world, but is also widely depicted in these places 
/as global/, as something affecting everyone, no matter where they live, 
at this very time. /Media/ are central to this simultaneous 
pervasiveness and extensiveness, not only because they represent the 
crisis to large audiences around the world, but also because 
contemporary media technologies are profoundly and almost ubiquitously 
embedded into the social world at small and large scales, from the 
intimate everyday lives of individuals to global infrastructures 
(Couldry and Hepp, 2017). Covid-19 visibly demonstrates the existential 
stakes of this media pervasiveness and extensiveness, particularly 
during ‘lockdowns’, through the sudden substitution of physical 
co-presence with mediated interaction and digital intimacy and 
solidarity via digital screens. Hence part of the pandemic’s cultural 
significance is as a widely shared and represented experience of 
mediated relations /in extremis/: of technologized ‘intimacy at a 
distance’ and digitized ‘solidarity in proximity’ becoming paradoxically 
obligatory conditions for much social life and cultural activity 
(especially across cities of the Global North). The crisis, then, 
generates a historically contingent but powerful affinity between the 
pandemic, on the one hand, and the primary mechanisms of its cultural 
mediation.

These questions and their elaboration only really begin to set the scene 
for thinking about Covid-19 as a /global crisis/. In this special issue 
we invite substantial contributions (5,000-7,000 words) that engage with 
‘the crisis’ from perspectives connected to cultural studies, media and 
communications, and that take transnational relations and dynamics as 
their principal frames of reference. Particular topics of possible 
interest include, but are not limited to:

- the representation of Covid-19

- race, gender, sexuality, class, age, disability and Covid-19

- Covid-19, migration and (im)mobility

- Covid-19 as a biopolitical crisis

- Covid-19, nationalism and transnationalism

- data appropriation, surveillance and Covid-19

- celebrity, consumer culture and Covid-19

- media and cultural industries and Covid-19

- Covid-19 and historical transformation

- cultural memory and Covid-19

- urban and rural crisis experience and solidarity

- Covid-19, mediation and mediatization

- live performance culture (live music, theatres etc.) in crisis

- Covid-19 and art

Please submit abstracts (300 words max.) to: (paul.frosh /at/ mail.huji.ac.il) 
<mailto:(paul.frosh /at/ mail.huji.ac.il)> and (m.a.georgiou /at/ lse.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(m.a.georgiou /at/ lse.ac.uk)>

Deadline: Abstracts: March 10 2021; Papers: 31 July 2021

No payment from authors is required.


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