Law, Humanities and the COVID Crisis

While there has been an abundance of scientific works on the COVID-19 crisis, there has been relatively little research to date from the humanities. This striking new book seeks to address the immediacy of COVID-19 by focusing on the implications of the virus in a wider interdisciplinary context – through the lens of the law, history, ethics, technology, economics and gender studies.

From Europe to South America, Asia and beyond, Law, Humanities and the COVID Crisis sets out a framework for understanding the COVID-19 virus beyond its epidemiological constraints, asking us to question the very definition of what it means to be human. Researchers from around the world offer their critical reflections on the past, present, and future of this period of sociocultural upheaval and the tremendous suffering that has laid bare fundamental imbalances in our society. Featuring essays on public welfare versus private interest, violence against women, mask compliance, conspiracy theories and national security laws, this book is a significant contribution to understanding our new 'post-COVID' landscape, and the future yet to come.

Introduction

Carl F. Stychin

1. Public Interest or Social Need? Reflections on the Pandemic, Technology and the Law

Dimitrios Kivotidis

2. COVID, Commodification and Conspiracism

David M. Seymour

3. Counting the Dead During a Pandemic

Marc Trabsky

4. The Law and the Limits of the Dressed Body: Masking Regulation and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic in Australia

Marc De Vitis and David J Carter

5. Walls and Bridges: Framing Lockdown through Metaphors of Imprisonment and Fantasies of Escape

David Gurnham

6. Penal Response and Biopolitics in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Indonesian Experience

Harison Citrawan and Sabrina Nadilla

7. The Pandemic and Two Ships

Renisa Mawani and Mikki Stelder

8. Women, Violence and Protest in times of COVID-19

Kim Barker and Olga Jurasz

9. COVID-19 and the Legal Regulation of Working Families

Nicole Busby and Grace James

10. Law, Everyday Spaces and Objects, and Being Human

Jill Marshall

11. Pandemic, Humanities and The Legal Imagination of The Disaster

Valerio Nitrato Izzo

12. Prospects for Recovery in Brazil: Deweyan Democracy, the Legacy of Fernando Cardoso and the Obstruction of Jair Bolsonaro

Frederic R Kellogg, George Browne Rego and Pedro Spindola B Alves