scholarly journals COVID-19 AND THE GREAT PANDEMICS OF HUMANITY: a historical and sociological view

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. a17en
Author(s):  
Natália de Lima Gasque ◽  
Fábio Andrade Dias ◽  
Francielli Gonçalves Rodrigues ◽  
Maria Vitória Nogueira Marvulli ◽  
Nelson Russo de Moraes
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Sociological View

Sociology as an area of knowledge that studies human social relations has been used as a safe way to understand the phenomena that involve human beings in their sociability. Accordingly, this article presents a literature and documentary review, within a socio-historical perspective, about the main pandemics that have plagued humanity in order to discuss the covid-19 pandemic. For this objective to be achieved, a bibliographic and documentary review was carried out based on a qualitative historiographical approach. The review generated a historically organized discussion of the main pandemics that occurred to humanity, which led to the understand of a convergence between the fields of public health, public policies as well as the need to create structures to prevent and fight pandemics. It is concluded that the pandemic cycles faced by humanity interfere strongly in several social issues, slowing down the rhythm of people’s lives, generating structural and political changes in the health and economic systems.

Community Medicine under Imperialism: A New Medical Police?

1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Breilh
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Primary Care ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Community Services ◽  
Consumer Market ◽  
Social Demand ◽  
The People ◽  
Coverage Extension

This paper explains the historical reasons for the reappearance, since the middle of the 20th century, of social issues in the medical context of capitalist countries. The author interprets the rise of a community trend in medicine as one of the solutions that capitalism is proposing for the problems of public health. He considers that primary care coverage extension projects provide a means to attend to minimal levels of social demand, as well as basic conditions for the protection of previously neglected populations, without changing social relations or significantly diminishing productive investment. On the contrary, the consumer market will in many cases be expanded by new forms of demand. The contradictory nature of “community” services under capitalism is analyzed so as to provide a basis for the design of a strategy that takes into account the interests of the people.

Notes from the Editors, May 2020

2020 ◽  
pp. c2-63
Author(s):  
The Editors
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Ecology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Metabolic Rift ◽  
Finance Capital ◽  
The World

buy this issue In its wider economic, ecological, epidemiological, and public health context, the current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enormous dangers of the metabolic rift in human ecology and epidemiology brought on by capitalist social relations in the age of monopoly-finance capital, global agribusiness, and intricate, globe-spanning supply chains associated with the extreme exploitation and expropriation of both human beings and nature. Neoliberalism, representing the inner logic of capitalism, has left the world vulnerable to catastrophe wherever it has come into play.

An Intersectional Approach to the “Mobility Trap” That Ensnares Migrant Youth in China

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaorong Gu
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Urban China ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Migrant Youth ◽  
Political Economic

This essay explores the theory of intersectionality in the study of youths’ lives and social inequality in the Global South. It begins with an overview of the concept of intersectionality and its wide applications in social sciences, followed by a proposal for regrounding the concept in the political economic systems in particular contexts (without assuming the universality of capitalist social relations in Northern societies), rather than positional identities. These systems lay material foundations, shaping the multiple forms of deprivation and precarity in which Southern youth are embedded. A case study of rural migrant youths’ ‘mobility trap’ in urban China is used to illustrate how layers of social institutions and structures in the country’s transition to a mixed economy intersect to influence migrant youths’ aspirations and life chances. The essay concludes with ruminations on the theoretical and social implications of the political-economy-grounded intersectionality approach for youth studies.

scholarly journals Health inequities and technological solutions during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic in high-income countries

2021 ◽  
pp. 175797592098418
Author(s):  
Muriel Mac-Seing ◽  
Robson Rocha de Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Health Equity ◽  
Vulnerable Populations ◽  
Health Inequities ◽  
High Income ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Health Priorities ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
And Control ◽  
Political Decisions

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in massive disruptions to public health, healthcare, as well as political and economic systems across national borders, thus requiring an urgent need to adapt. Worldwide, governments have made a range of political decisions to enforce preventive and control measures. As junior researchers analysing the pandemic through a health equity lens, we wish to share our reflections on this evolving crisis, specifically: (a) the tenuous intersections between the responses to the pandemic and public health priorities; (b) the exacerbation of health inequities experienced by vulnerable populations following decisions made at national and global levels; and (c) the impacts of the technological solutions put forward to address the crisis. Examples drawn from high-income countries are provided to support our three points.

Using the Weibull distribution to model COVID-19 epidemic data

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Vitor Hugo Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Weibull Distribution ◽  
Initial Phase ◽  
Public Health Emergency ◽  
Protective Equipment ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Model Predictions ◽  
Disease Epidemics ◽  
Vaccination Campaigns

COVID-19 is a severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by the new Coronavirus. COVID-19 outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, declared by WHO, that killed more than 2 million people worldwide. Since there are no specific drugs available and vaccination campaigns are in the initial phase, or even have not begun in some countries, the main way to fight the outbreak worldwide is still based on non-pharmacological strategies, such as the use of protective equipment, social isolation and mass testing. Modeling of the disease epidemics have gained pivotal importance to guide health authorities on the decision making and applying of those strategies. Here, we present the use of the Weibull distribution to model predictions of the COVID-19 outbreak based on daily new cases and deaths data, by non-linear regression using Metropolis-Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations. It was possible to predict the evolution of daily new cases and deaths of COVID-19 in many countries as well as the overall number of cases and deaths in the future. Modeling predictions of COVID-19 pandemic may be of importance on the evaluation of governments and health authorities mitigation procedures, since it allows one to extract parameters that may help to guide those decisions and measures, slowing down the spread of the disease.

The Head, the Hand, and Matter: New Materialism and the Politics of Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Rekret
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Constructivism ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Do So

This article seeks to examine the political connotations of a recent ‘material turn’ in social and political theory and its implications for theorizations of political agency. ‘New materialist’ theories are premised upon transcending the limits which social constructivism places upon thought, viewed as a reification of the division of subject and object and so a hubristic anthropocentrism which places human beings at the centre of social existence. Yet new materialist theories have tended to locate the conditions of the separation of mind and world they seek to overcome upon the terrain of epistemic or ethical error. By taking the work of Quentin Meillassoux, Jane Bennett and Karen Barad as exemplary, this article contends that new materialist theories not only fall short of their own materialist pretensions insofar as they do not interrogate the material conditions of the separation of the mental and material, but that the failure to do so has profound repercussions for the success of their accounts of political agency. This essay seeks to offer a counter-narrative to new materialist theories by situating the hierarchy between thought and world as a structural feature of capitalist social relations.

Catholic Social Teaching

2015 ◽  
pp. 442-456
Author(s):  
David Matzko McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Catholic Social Teaching ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Mutual Cooperation ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Rerum Novarum ◽  
The Common

This essay considers the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching (CST). CST finds its roots in the biblical, patristic, and medieval periods, but was inaugurated in particular by Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and has been sustained by a range of papal encyclicals and conciliar documents since. The documents of CST emphasize that human beings are created for mutual cooperation and a pursuit of common good in social, economic, and political life. The essay considers first CST’s developing account of how social relations may be governed by Christian charity. It then considers the nature of property within economic relations as conceived within CST. The final section considers CST’s reflections on political life, which is understood as primarily personal and dependent on relations of mutual rights and responsibilities that are directed to the common good.

scholarly journals Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ciro Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance State ◽  
Laws And Regulations

This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.

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