Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty: Studies of Social Phenomena and Social Theory Across 6 Continents (Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty) [1st ed. 2022] 9783030951665, 9783030951672, 3030951669

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CRITICAL STUDIES IN RISK AND UNCERTAINTY

Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty Studies of Social Phenomena and Social Theory Across 6 Continents Edited by Patrick R. Brown · Jens O. Zinn

Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty

Series Editors Patrick R. Brown University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Anna Olofsson Mid Sweden University Östersund, Sweden Jens O. Zinn University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Palgrave’s Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty series publishes monographs, edited volumes and Palgrave Pivots that capture and analyse how societies, organisations, groups and individuals experience and confront uncertain futures. This series will provide a multidisciplinary home to consolidate this dynamic and growing academic field, bringing together and representing the state of the art on various topics within the broader domain of critical studies of risk and uncertainty. Moreover, the series is sensitive to the broader political, structural and socio-cultural conditions in which particular approaches to complexity and uncertainty become legitimated ahead of others. It provides cutting edge theoretical and empirical, as well as established and emerging methodological contributions, and welcomes projects on risk, trust, hope, intuition, emotions and faith. Explorations into the institutionalisation of approaches to uncertainty within regulatory and other governmental regimes are also of interest. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15840

Patrick R. Brown  •  Jens O. Zinn Editors

Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty Studies of Social Phenomena and Social Theory Across 6 Continents

Editors Patrick R. Brown Department of Sociology University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland The Netherlands

Jens O. Zinn School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2523-7268     ISSN 2523-7276 (electronic) Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty ISBN 978-3-030-95166-5    ISBN 978-3-030-95167-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95167-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 COVID-19 Risks: Dynamics of Culture and Inequality Across Six Continents  1 Jens O. Zinn and Patrick R. Brown Part I Governing COVID-19  27 2 Responding to Covid-19 in India: Reducing Risk or Increasing Domination? 29 Kritika Maheshwari 3 Discourses Around Telework in the Brazilian Banking Sector: The Impact of COVID-19 in Shifting Framings of Vulnerability and Risk 53 Fernanda Sousa-Duarte 4 Social, Health, and Environmental Impacts of the Mandatory Lockdown in Underprivileged Neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires 85 Melina Tobías and Soledad Fernández Bouzo

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5 True to Type? How Governance Traditions Shaped Responses to Covid-­19 in China, Germany, UK, and USA115 Henry Rothstein, David Demeritt, Regine Paul, and Li Wang Part II Communicating and Interpreting COVID-19 Risk 145 6 Everyday Life During COVID-19 in Stockholm: A Biographical Approach147 Linda Kvarnlöf 7 Uncertainty, Fear and Control During COVID-19 … or … Making a Safe Boat to Survive Rough Seas: The Lived Experience of Women in South Australia During Early COVID-19 Lockdowns167 Paul R. Ward, Kristen Foley, Samantha B. Meyer, Jessica Thomas, Eliza Huppatz, Ian Olver, Emma R. Miller, and Belinda Lunnay 8 COVID-19 in Argentina: Risks, Media, and Fears in Confinement Times191 Brenda Focás and Esteban Zunino 9 Living the Modern Dream: Risk Quantification and Modeling During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Chile217 Magdalena Gil and Eduardo A. Undurraga Part III Pandemic Risk: Emerging Conceptual and Methodological Issues 245 10 COVID-19, World Risk Society, and the Transformation of the State247 Dean Curran

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11 COVID-19 and the Environmental Crises: Knowledge, Social Order and Transformative Change267 Rolf Lidskog and Adam Standring 12 The Ethics of Risk Research in the Time of COVID-19: Ethnography at a Distance in Privileging the Well-Being of Girls and Young Women in the Context of GenderBased Violence in Rural South Africa295 Claudia Mitchell, Relebohile Moletsane, and Darshan Daryanani Index323

Notes on Contributors

Patrick R. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on social processes of trust, risk and hope in the midst of vulnerability. Dean Curran  is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. He has published on risk, inequality and social theory. Darshan Daryanani  is an undergraduate student at McGill University in Montreal. Darshan is reading for a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with minors in Communication Studies and Social Entrepreneurship. David Demeritt  is Professor of Geography and associate director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society at King’s College London. He has published extensively on the communication and management of environmental risks. Soledad Fernández Bouzo  is an assistant researcher in the Argentine Scientific and Technical Research Council. She has specialized in ecofeminism and urban environmental problems. Brenda Focás  is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and professor at the National University of San Martín, Argentina. Her research focuses on the study of audiences and media consumption and on the public problematization of risk and insecurity. ix

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Kristen Foley  is completing her doctorate which explores the commercial determinants of alcohol consumption for Australian women in midlife. Her research interests include flourishing across the life course, feminist sociology, the cultural politics of knowledge and public health. Magdalena Gil  is an associate professor in the School of Government, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and a researcher at the National Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN). Her research focuses on intersections between society, technology and the environment. Eliza Huppatz  is a registered occupational therapist based in Adelaide, South Australia. She has worked in community development roles in local and state government with both First Nations and non-Aboriginal communities. Linda Kvarnlöf  is Lecturer in Sociology at Mid Sweden University. Her main area of research is risk and everyday life, with a special interest in how people make sense of risk, uncertainty and preparedness. Rolf Lidskog  is Professor of Sociology at the Environmental Sociology Section, Örebro University, Sweden. He has published widely on expertise, risk and politics within the environmental field. Belinda Lunnay  is a post-doctoral research associate in the College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University, South Australia. She has expertise on class-based inequity and women’s alcohol-related perceptions of risk during crisis. Kritika Maheshwari  is a final-year doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen. Her research work and interests lie at the intersection of moral, political and epistemological issues surrounding risk and uncertainty in modern societies. Samantha B. Meyer  is an associate professor in the School of Public Health Sciences, University of Waterloo, Canada. She is an applied social scientist with a program of research focused on research design and methodologies and the application of social theory to health research.

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Emma R. Miller  is an epidemiologist with particular expertise in hepatitis C, STI, and substance use. She has experience in the surveillance of communicable diseases and a history of research in this area. Claudia Mitchell  is a Distinguished James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University. Her research focus on particapatory visual methodologies, girlhood studies and social justice. Relebohile Moletsane is Professor and JL Dube Chair in Rural Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Her work focuses gender and sexuality education in rural schools. Ian Olver  a medical oncologist, is a psycho-oncology researcher with the School of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Adelaide. Regine Paul  is Associate Professor of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen. She has published widely on migration and risk governance and co-edits Critical Policy Studies. Henry Rothstein  is Professor of Risk and Regulation at King’s College London. His main research interests concern the institutional factors shaping risk governance regimes across policy domains and countries. Fernanda Sousa-Duarte  is a senior research fellow in the Laboratory of Psychodynamics and Clinic of Work, University of Brasília. Her research focuses on a critical approach to psychopathology of work. Adam Standring is a post-doctoral researcher in Environmental Sociology at Örebro University and from Spring 2022 an MSCA fellow at De Montfort University, researching the politics of expertise. Jessica Thomas  is a doctoral researcher with a background in health promotion. Her research focuses on understanding why women drink alcohol and how we can ‘work with’ communities to reduce alcohol-­ related breast cancer risk. Melina Tobías  is an assistant researcher in the Argentine Scientific and Technical Research Council and Professor of Methodology, University of José C. Paz. She has specialized in political ecology of water.

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Eduardo A. Undurraga is an associate professor in the School of Government, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on the interaction between the social sciences and human health. Li Wang  is a research associate in the Department of Geography, King’s College London. His research expertise is in the regulation and reduction of social and natural risks. Paul R. Ward  is Professor of Public Health at Torrens University in Australia. Paul’s main research interests are around lay and professional perceptions, knowledge and understandings of health, healthcare, medicines, risk and trust. Jens O. Zinn  is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Melbourne. He has worked on risk topics in Germany, the UK and Sweden such as risk-taking, discourse semantic changes and globalization. Esteban Zunino  is a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and a professor at the National University of Cuyo, Argentina. He is dedicated to communication studies.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1

Publications including “telework”, “home office” or “remote work” in banks and unions per year 62 Publications using “home office”, “telework” and “remote work” between 2017 and 2020 65 Timeline—evolution of measures against COVID-19 in the AMBA. (Source: Prepared by the authors) 92 New soup kitchens in José C. Paz. (Source: Neighbours of José C. Paz) 99 Soup kitchen in underprivileged neighbourhoods of José C. Paz. (Source: Neighbours of José C. Paz) 100 Water collection at Villa 31. (Source: La Nación newspaper—18/05/2020)104 Stringency of national Covid-19 response, 31 March 2020, based on Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker Index (Hale et al., 2020), a composite index based on 9 response indicators for travel bans and closures of schools and businesses, rescaled from 0 (least stringent) to 100 (most stringent). (Source: Our World in Data (2020)) 116 Conceptual map of responses to the uncertainty of living during COVID-19 174 Tamara’s story (a known, steady boat) 180 COVID-19 coverage frequency. Clarín, La Nación, Infobae, and Página/12. March 20 to July 17, 2020. Source: self-made 203 xiii

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Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 12.3 Fig. 12.4

List of Figures

Frequency of secondary topics associated with COVID-19. Clarín, La Nación, Infobae, and Página/12. March 20 to July 17, 2020. Source: self-made 205 Elements of fear and risk in the media coverage of COVID-19. Clarín, La Nación, Infobae, and Página/12. March 20 to July 17, 2020. Source: self-made 207 Distance! One of the small villages in Loskop. (Credit: Lisa Wiebesiek)301 The SIFs leading a protest march through their community. (Credit: Lisa Wiebesiek) 304 Data collection on violence against women and COVID-19: decision tree 308 Inventory of ethnography at a distance 315

1 COVID-19 Risks: Dynamics of Culture and Inequality Across Six Continents Jens O. Zinn and Patrick R. Brown

Background and Aims As we write this introduction in the late Spring of 2021, it has become common to read academic articles which begin: ‘Since at the end of 2019 a new coronavirus was discovered in Wuhan, China, societies worldwide responded to the quickly spreading virus’. The vast majority of these articles then progress to zoom in on one particular national context or local setting. What is rather less common in academic work, despite being commonly recognised more widely, is the varying manifestation of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as a social phenomenon across different

J. O. Zinn (*) School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. R. Brown Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. R. Brown, J. O. Zinn (eds.), Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95167-2_1

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countries. Not only was the virus experienced differently around the world, but the policy and governance responses vary radically in their format, often following national and global divisions. Therefore, we are not only sitting in different boats during the same storm (Chawla et al., 2020; NHSProviders w.y., n.d.; Tett, 2020), but the development of the storm varies quite a lot across different localities. This includes us as researchers as well with our research priorities and the conditions we work under (see Mitchell, Moletsaner & Daryanani—Chap. 12 in this book). The pandemic has also demonstrated the strength and the vulnerability of the enlightenment process of empirically based knowledge production and rational decision-making, which became challenged not only by religious fundamentalism but from within modern states, such as the US and UK, by political populism. From the early months of 2020, when there was widespread uncertainty regarding how dangerous the virus might be and what the appropriate responses ought to be (see Alaszewski, 2021 for an insightful account), we have witnessed the implementation of various sets of measures such as face mask wearing, social distancing measures, curfews and local or regional lockdowns, quarantining, testing and tracing, and vaccinating. The implementation of these measures and their relative (in) effectiveness varied across time and over geographical and social space, as did resistance to these measures (Zinn, 2020; Alaszewski, 2021). There was considerable public debate and scrutiny over the most appropriate (non-) responses to balancing the economic and health impact most efficiently and protecting vulnerable groups, stimulated by the availability of infection rates, fatalities and later vaccination rates in close to real time. These data enabled social scientists to discern ostensibly clear early patterns of the extent of COVID-19 illness and mortality, as these were shaped by governance responses and social structures. But with new mutations spreading and early lifting of measures triggering new mega spreading events such as the Kumbh Mela festival in India in March 2021 (Pandey, 2021) and the Euro 2020–related heightened infections (McEvoy, 2021), the social patterning of the pandemic has remained in flux. More recently, competition for vaccines and varying levels of hesitancy among different groups—shaped by different levels of trust and risk consciousness, as these are in turn shaped by race and ethnicity,

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education background and other relations between centre and periphery—have resulted in new patterns and ongoing tensions (Allington et al., 2021; Bump et al., 2021; Calnan & Douglass, 2020; Ejaz et al., 2021; see Benjamin, 2016 for a wider analysis of ‘informed refusal’ and its embeddedness in the historical geo-politics and coloniality of health). While citizens and their governments are struggling with responding to the unfolding pandemic, a quickly growing body of scientific publications has emerged, ranging from early reflections and explorative studies to increasingly sophisticated research and conceptual work. Among social science contributions to this fast-growing body of work, scholars drawing upon existing work within the sociology of risk and uncertainty have already contributed through works including Brown et al. (2020), Lupton and Willis (2021), Alaszewski (2021), Zinn (2021), Journal of Risk Research special issues (issues 23: 7–8; 24: 3–4) and various articles published in Health, Risk & Society 2021 (issues 23: 3–4; 7–8; see, e.g. de Graaff et  al., 2021; Ejaz et  al., 2021; Manca, 2021; Prati et  al., 2021; Rossignol et al., 2021; Wang & Mao, 2021). At the same time, we have witnessed an infodemic (WHO, 2020)—a widespread dissemination of (mis)information from within and outside advanced industrialised societies. Where we have been more used to framing social reality as a triumph of humanity over nature and rationality over metaphysics and the superiority of the Global North over the Global South, the COVID-19 phenomenon, as nature and as culture, has challenged much of what we have taken-for-granted about the world around us. Our aim with this book is to contribute to the emerging scholarship on the pandemic through chapters studying the social phenomena of COVID-19 across six continents and 11 countries, thus providing a global perspective on a global crisis, with comparative and national case studies on the governance, discourses and everyday life experience of the crisis including conceptual and ethical considerations. Whereas risk studies have been dominated by voices and positions from Europe and English-speaking countries around the world, the empirical studies and analytical insights which make up this book are rather more diverse in their geographies and the epistemic communities drawn upon.

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The contributions in this volume address key issues such as the markedly different national risk governance approaches to the pandemic. In particular, chapters will explore how current governance manifestations are developed in relation to domination and the legal restrictions of citizen rights in India (Maheshwari), the governing of teleworking risks in Brazil as these are framed by large employer organisations and trade unions (Sousa-Duarte), and at the margins of state involvement in favelas in Buenos Aires (Tobías and Fernández Bouzo), while a comparative study of pandemic responses in China, US, UK and Germany (Rothstein) emphasises the path dependency shaped by different governance traditions. In our second section—Communicating and Interpreting COVID-19 Risk—the first two chapters highlight how people struggle applying governmental recommendations in their everyday life practices in Sweden (Kvarnlöf ) and how women in Australia try to stay in control during lockdown (Ward and colleagues). These investigations of everyday coping, as with the earlier chapter on coping amid the vacuum left by limited state governance (Tobías and Fernández Bouzo), are usefully contextualised by considerations of the relationship between media communication and public perception of risk, as examined in Argentina (by Focás and Zunino). We close the second section with a fascinating set of in-depth insights into the tensions between politics and science in the framing of public debate in Chile, from the perspective of the scientists (Gil and Undurraga). Part III closes the book with important methodological and conceptual reflections. These reflections pertain to the changing role of the nation state (Curran) and the relationship between society, nature and the pandemic (Lidskog and Standring). While these first two chapters of Part III are written at a more abstract level, oriented by standpoints from the Far North of our globe (Canada and Sweden, respectively), we close this volume with our most methodological and practice-oriented chapter, wherein important questions are raised about ethical conduct when researching vulnerable people through the example of girls and young women in South Africa (Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani). Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani close their chapter with practical policy recommendations for mitigating the risks to vulnerable women and girls

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amid pandemics, drawing on data and lessons learned from their recent research into the effects of COVID-19 in rural South Africa, alongside earlier lessons drawn from earlier pandemics experienced across different parts of sub-Saharan Africa. These important scientific and policy insights from Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani, rooted in an academic tradition where pandemic challenges have been studied—and learned from—up close for decades, are a fitting way to close the book. In doing so, we underline our central aim which is to highlight the way critical social science studies of risk and uncertainty can be enriched by becoming more truly global.

Insights from the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty The configuration of the book in these three sections is designed to highlight the contributions of the chapters to various core themes within the sociology of risk and uncertainty. For social scientists studying risk, the emergence of another infectious disease that occurred and contributed to the transformation of the World Risk Society was not a surprise. As Ulrich Beck once suggested, our globalising society is increasingly shaped by conflicts about the allocation of risks (1986, 1992, 2009). For a long time, experts have warned that it is not a question of whether but when the next pandemic will strike, and governments around the world had been well advised to prepare for a worst-case scenario similar to the Spanish Flu (Alaszewski, 2021). But amid a continuous stream of risk issues, could we have known that the new infectious disease, which surfaced in late 2019 in Wuhan, had such potential to become a pandemic challenging governments worldwide? As Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky argued in 1982 when introducing their famous book Risk and Culture it is particularly difficult to predict an unknown future: ‘Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot; but yes, we must act as if we do’ (p. 1). We have to select which risks we consider, respond to or side-line. Thus, they suggested that even though ‘the dangers are only too horribly real’, the

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risk discourse is not about ‘the reality of dangers, but about how they are politicised’ (p. 8). As a result, Douglas (1990, p. 8) encourages us to consider how ‘the debate always links some real danger and some disapproved behaviour, coding the danger in terms of a threat to valued institutions’. These considerations, linking dangers to values, were the starting point for the cultural symbolic approach to risk (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982), from which the sociology of risk and uncertainty originated, with a quickly emerging body of research, concepts and theorising (see Adams, 1995; Arnoldi, 2009; Boyne, 2003; Lupton, 1999 [2005]; Zinn, 2008b). However, not all risks that gain recognition and legitimacy necessarily follow the lines of value systems explicitly formulated and normatively supported. Instead, cultural systems should be understood as contradictory, sometimes establishing implicit or hidden realities and agendas. As a result, risks affect people differently, depending on many social and material factors, such as a person’s social status, their line of work and where they live. An important example of such contradictions and tensions around risk emerges in the unequal vulnerabilities to COVID-19 infection experienced by many marginalised and minority groups, with these inequalities existing alongside political rhetoric of ‘we are all in it together’—a common refrain expressed by everyone from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to UN Secretary-General António Guterres. This ‘epistemic fallacy around risk (in)equality’ (Furlong & Cartmel, 2006, p. 138) reflects deeper tensions and fault lines in northern European welfare states that cherish norms of equality rights while also supporting a culture of competition and achievement. Thus, a heightened attentiveness towards particular risks may often surface during crisis situations, by which certain objects, beliefs or practices become ‘scandalised’ when they are understood as contradicting—or illuminating contradictions within—socio-cultural value systems (Brown et al., 2020). As a modern concept, risk has been involved in the disenchantment of the world, by showing the forces that shape social conditions considered natural (such as poverty and gender inequalities), while also more generally providing evidence for all kinds of phenomena, such as explaining the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, London, by John Snow often considered the founder of modern epidemiology. In this way risk calculation has become a great ‘objectiviser’, a metaphor for an evidence-­based and

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rational way of managing social reality. Risk is thus part of the modern machinery which develops the master narrative or modern dream of evidence-based, scientific management of risk and uncertainty, which became a central tenet of modern societies’ social identity in distancing themselves from earlier eras. This narrative was driven by the development and institutionalisation of modern science, epidemiology, risk assessment and management amongst others. As Max Weber highlighted, however, the modern rationalisation process has systematic limits, and the social management of risk and uncertainty requires a management not only of facts but of social relationships, and these cannot be separated. Consequently, building on the grounds of critical ontology, Bruno Latour suggested that the separation of nature and culture is a modern myth, but as work within the sociology of risk and uncertainty has argued, this nature-culture dualism remains a powerful narrative that has shaped the development of scientific disciplines and institutionalised practices as well as public debate and national responses during the coronavirus crisis, though sometimes in unexpected ways. Within countries that had been world leading in the science-based management of infectious diseases, sizeable groups became ‘re-enchanted’ with conspiracy theories and myths outrightly questioning scientific wisdom such as the Donald Trump government in the USA.  In contrast countries known for their religious shaping of their politics and culture, such as Iran, engaged in a pragmatic, scientifically informed response to the pandemic, triggering resistance from some orthodox believers, which expressed difficulties in following the shift from faith to science in the face of the pandemic. Similarly, as we look at the chapters across this volume—whether we start more from the top-down (Part I) or consider everyday life amid policies and politics (Part II)—we see evidence of ‘bricolaged’ (Horlick-Jones et al., 2007) approaches to uncertainty, whereby both governments and citizens combine rational, non-rational and ‘in-­ between’ approaches (Zinn, 2008a). In this way COVID-19 has become a powerful reminder of the limits to rational decision-making under uncertainty (Zinn, 2008a), when patterns of rational critique may be used metaphorically. Stripped off any empirical basis and newly combined into conspiracy theories (Rooke, 2021) these are followed on the basis of trust, faith and emotion more so

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than evidence. Thus, despite many successes, questions could be raised to what extent the enlightenment project of modernity has been hollowed out in advanced industrialised societies, as would seem to be apparent in the USA through challenging and threatening the fundamental institutions of modern societies such as science, democracy and independent news media. Europe, which was largely spared from recent viruses (SARS-CoV-1 in 2003; H1N1 in 2009), became one of the worst-hit regions with large proportions of their ageing populations being highly vulnerable to COVID-19. Patterns of mobility, work and lifestyle (e.g. skiing holidays) fostered a fast spreading of the virus while politicians were slow and reluctant to accept the new social reality of SARS-CoV-2. Alaszewski (2021) highlights the tendency of many European governments to frame the virus as flu-like, while Demir (2020) notes the orientalist standpoint of the UK government, where there was a sense that the problems facing other (distant and exotic) countries would not manifest themselves in Britain. Apparent in these examples are political-cultural processes of values and categorisation and how these have affected the (non)response to the virus (Brown, 2020; Zinn, 2020, 2021a, 2021b). During later waves of the pandemic, the epicentre of the virus moved on with new mutations appearing. While countries of the Global North have been attempting to build on advances in vaccine development, which look likely to control the virus in the near future, other countries have been cut off from such resources and are still struggling to find the balance of lockdown and reopening, health and economic necessities. What we see above, therefore, is the dynamic interaction of culture and inequality in helping us understand the ongoing scale of the COVID-19 problem. As reflected in chapters in the book, countries characterised by striking inequality (South Africa, Brazil, India and, to a lesser degree, the UK) and a political-cultural response oriented by populist downplaying of COVID-19 as a problem (Brazil, India and the UK) have been apparent sources of four concerning mutations of the virus which reshape the very nature of the virus itself, as well as recasting the possibilities for containing its spread.

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Key Issues Explored in This Book As reflected in the title and central theme of this book, the coronavirus crisis has importantly illuminated how manifestations and responses to global risks vary greatly across regions and nation states. The tradition of risk governance studies has emphasised how the institutional context in different countries shapes the selection, understanding and responses to risk (Hood et al., 2001). This branch of research has been powerful in showing how responses to global risk, which sometimes seem counterintuitive or inefficient at the first glance, might follow traditions and criteria which serve national styles of governing. Rothstein, Demeritt, Paul and Wang contribute to this research tradition with their rich comparative study of governance approaches in China, Germany, UK and USA. One of the issues apparent in governments’ responses to the pandemic crisis has been the conundrum of balancing between protection of population health and citizen rights. Significant differences have emerged between the democratic societies of the Global North, which have significant protection of citizen rights in place—through combinations of constitutions and informal norms—and a number of Asian societies with more paternalistic styles of governing which have realised significant restrictions of individual rights for the protection of wider population health (see Rothstein et  al.’s comparative analysis). In a detailed case study of India, Maheshwari examines specific governance practices emerging amid the postcolonial legislative framework of India. Using an analytical lens shaped by republican political philosophy, Maheshwari argues that the legislation lacks concrete procedural regulations, thereby opening spheres of arbitrary exercises of power—thus domination—with little protection of citizen rights. As noted earlier, Brazil and India share various characteristics, including institutional and legal frameworks rooted in colonial traditions of racism/caste-ism and inequality, with contrasting political orientations between populist presidents, on the one hand, and state and city authorities on the other. In the Brazilian context, Sousa-Duarte considers the partial vacuum existing amid inaction from the federal government, focusing her attention on the governing process that involves non-state

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actors such as trade unions and the banking sector, as these shape the lived COVID-19 experiences of everyday banking work. Sousa-Duarte observes that unions and banks have reshaped their original positions to ‘teleworking’/‘home office’ approaches by emphasising the positive health effects, thereby finding new possibilities for working practices as the risks and vulnerabilities faced by workers are gradually reframed amid workplace risk governance frameworks. Whereas unionised workers in the banking sector are privileged in the Brazilian context, in neighbouring Argentina, Tobías and Fernández Bouzo provide a detailed account of the mechanisms which shape how already vulnerable social groups, living on the social, economic and geographic periphery of Buenos Aires (Argentina), have suffered disproportionately through precautionary and mandatory lockdowns that intervene with arrangements necessary for survival. This chapter also illuminates how experiences of, and coping amid, inequality and vulnerability are importantly gendered, with women being relied upon for significant amounts of care work and economic activity. In this way, in the absence of state intervention, gendered cultural processes configure who is required to ‘do’ and ‘undo risk’ (Montelius & Giritli Nygren, 2014) in care work for those most vulnerable. Douglas is especially useful here in helping us understand how and why these cultural processes around risk reproduce themselves in ways which affirm existing hierarchies. As other risk researchers have noted, ‘the way that risks are perceived and done in everyday life always needs to be read within a frame of prevailing structures of power’ (Giritli Nygren et al., 2017, p. 428). A large and growing body of research has therefore engaged in both theoretically led and empirically rich research on the experience of inequality in contexts of risk, as well as amid disaster (Zaidi & Fordham, 2021; Enarson et al., 2018). Much of the work in the Global North on inequality and risk reflects Foucauldian lines of inquiry into governmentality (Hannah-Moffat & O’Malley, 2007; Giritli Nygren & Olofsson, 2020). These analyses usefully expose the underlying neoliberal logics apparent in the reconfiguring of governance structures and the risk calculation technologies reshaping and intensifying inequalities (Hannah-­ Moffat, 2013), yet also assume a state which is relatively large and increasingly influential despite its retrenchment.

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Approaches have, however, become more sensitive to the complexities of risk assemblages producing inequalities (Hannah-Moffat, 2018) and have started to challenge the prevailing focus on neoliberalism (Walby, 2020). Despite the emphasis on diffuse power, Foucauldian traditions can be considered more top-down in their analytical assumptions, whereas our emphasis on Douglasian approaches to inequality and risk reflects the greater onus on ‘bottom-up’ constellations of community responses to risk (Wilkinson, 2010). These become especially pertinent to studies in the Global South, where some communities exist very much on a periphery where the state is not so much retreating as having long abnegated responsibility. Alongside the many indicators which have highlighted the severe inequalities stemming from the public health responses to the pandemic, such as curfews and social distancing measures (Elgar et al., 2020; Kim & Bostwick, 2020; Mancini, 2021), various ‘southern’ studies in this volume draw our attention to the political-cultural processes emerging from non-responsive state structures. In the next section of the book, four further case studies contribute to a body of research exploring the political processes behind communicating risks, alongside the subjective sense making of interpreting risk. Two of these studies use narrative and biographical approaches (see Roberts, 2002; Zinn, 2010) to explore how people in everyday life make sense of and apply COVID-19-related regulations and in particular how they cope with a lengthy lockdown. Ward and colleagues’ study in South Australia shows how women aged 45–64 years obtained and maintained a sense of control when managing the uncertain and sometimes unclear information in the media and social media. Similarly, in her study of Stockholm residents, Kvarnlöf documents how participants in her study sometimes struggled to apply the government’s recommendations, partly due to the way these policies handed over most of the responsibility for protection against the virus to individual citizens, as they were made responsible for implementing these recommendations. Taking a step further ‘upstream’ to consider the production of risk communication, scholarship in this field can be considered as comprising a more normative branch, which describes the strategies of how best to communicate risk to the public to secure desired responses (Fischhoff,

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1995), and a descriptive branch, which is interested in reconstructing the mechanisms of risk communication in a broader societal perspective including the role of the media (Tulloch & Zinn, 2011). Contributing to the latter tradition, Focás and Zunino show how the Argentinean public’s perceptions and responses to media coverage changed over time, amid the influence of different media backers and the changing salience of COVID-related news for consumers. While the public became increasingly sceptical about the crisis in Argentina, so were the politicians in Chile challenging scientists’ expertise and modelling. Gil and Undurraga, in their study into scientific experts’ perspectives upon the public debate of scientific COVID-19 models in Chile, observed tensions between politicians and experts due to difficulties of mutual understanding, in contrast to many other countries where politicians claimed to draw upon scientific expertise to gain trustworthiness and public support for their responses (Zinn, 2021b). In the third and final section of the book, we include three chapters which reflect upon how the coronavirus has challenged the conceptualising and theorising of risk and uncertainty in multiple ways, as well as the methodological challenges emerging when doing research among some of those made most vulnerable amid the pandemic. Key issues here include the role of nation states in the management of new global risks (Beck, 2009, 2016) and the connection between society and its (material and living) environment (Latour, 1995, 2005; Zinn, 2016). Both these phenomena require us to refine existing conceptual approaches. In his contribution, Curran revisits the changing role of the nation state suggested in Beck’s World Risk Society theory, highlighting increasing numbers of cosmopolitan action spaces which are emerging. However, in his view and contrary to Beck, Curran suggests that the coronavirus crisis shows that the nation state’s role in managing risks locally increases while the ability to control nations’ global environment decreases (reflecting Beck’s roots in Habermas’s, 1975 assessment of governmental legitimacy and decision-making), causing new problems in meeting demands for security in reflexive modernity. As Lidskog and Standring argue, the problems and tensions in managing risk also vary in relation to specific understandings of a risk and what is viewed as being at stake. In particular these authors highlight that

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climate change triggered far less comprehensive and immediate responses in contrast to the COVID-19 pandemic. They advance their assessment of these contrasting approaches through the insight that it is necessary to engage in a broader view of different crises, in order to approach them in their connectedness, this being necessary to implement far-reaching transformative change. The underlining of this fundamental challenge to governments, populations and researchers, as we seek to develop more effective means of addressing complex global and systemic risks, is a pertinent message with which to finish this volume. In the final chapter of the book, we return to the intersectionality of geographic periphery, socio-economic disadvantage and gendered inequality as this dynamic phenomenon is explored further by Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani in their case study of vulnerable girls and young women in rural South Africa. In contrast to many publications on COVID-19, they also reflect how the pandemic affects themselves as researchers and their research practices amid vulnerable populations. Rooted in a longer-running study of experiences of sex- and gender-based violence, Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani reflect on their ethical responsibilities in researching vulnerable populations as these become reconfigured by the pandemic crisis. The authors provide perspectives for research in such contexts developing guidelines for an ‘ethnography at a distance’, alongside more practice- and policy-oriented steps for tackling gender-based violence. Their scholarship draws on a rich tradition of gender-oriented risk mitigation work in earlier pandemics. Before we introduce each chapter in more detail in the final section of this introduction chapter, it is worth taking a step back to consider some of the common threads emerging in the more thematically oriented overview we have offered in this section. Two recurring themes running through our discussions in this section have been inequality and culture. One defining strength of critical theories of risk and uncertainty has been novel ways of illuminating how these two social phenomena are connected. We see this in Foucauldian interrogations of knowledge production and its relationship to resistance amid state power and the pursuit of efficiency, in Beck’s concern with how a second modernity dominated by a political discussion of risks recasts traditional forms of inequality (Curran, 2016), but perhaps most clearly in the tensions between centre

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and periphery which Mary Douglas argued are central drivers of cultural dynamics, not least where contagion is concerned (Douglas & Calvez, 1990, pp. 454–455). Thus, we see above—and, moreover, in the chapters that follow—how deeply embedded cultural structures, as expressed through everyday norms and in more formal institutions, constrain the possibilities of governance approaches (Rothstein et  al.) or the interpretation of the law (Maheshwari), often in ways which reproduce the traditional hierarchies which gave rise to the cultural structures in the first place. This is perhaps most glaringly apparent in the colonial-based forms of domination and marginality which continue in India (Maheshwari), Argentina (Tobías and Fernández Bouzo) or South Africa (Mitchell, Moletsaner & Daryanani). In contrast to Douglas and Calvez’s (or Foucault’s) France of the 1980s, in which science and medicine were very much part of the centre/establishment, the role of science is seen to vary considerably across the countries and continents of this book. In some of the South American–focused chapters we see parts of the establishment using and, in some cases, dismissing science, which comes to play the role of a cultural artefact or ‘boundary object’, around which ‘interpretative flexibility’ (Leigh Star, 2010, p.  602) is employed for political and economic ends (Focás & Zunino; Gil & Undurraga). Meanwhile, in Mitchell, Moletsaner and Daryanani’s study we see grassroots organisations harnessing science and journalism as sense-making frameworks and tools for challenging existing hierarchies and the violence they precipitate. From the perspective of this cultural approach to risk it becomes apparent that the focus upon particular risks, and the way these are framed and understood, is above all shaped by centre-periphery relations and the need for communities to consolidate themselves in the face of threats to their existence (see Lidskog and Standring) and/or core values: The establishment theory has to do battle with alternative theories developed to prevent the community from tightening its control over its periphery. The cultural project on which all citizens are engaged defines bodies and dangers and uses both as instruments in the contest. (Douglas & Calvez, 1990, p. 455)

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The studies of everyday life and coping of Ward and colleagues, and of Kvarnlöf, bear this out in ways strikingly similar to the approaches of Douglas and Calvez’s study in Brittany in 1980s’ France, where aspects of science and ritual are combined to give semblances of control: ‘the theory that contagion enters by very specific routes gives him [or her] the cue for saying that [s]he is in control of his [her] own life. He argues rationally that he is in control of those routes, at least as much as he wants to be’ (p.  461). However, for Douglas, these individual narratives regarding control in relation to one’s environment and one’s body are always oriented, above all, by ways in which thinking and acting cements and protects a wider community. It is the role of communities in shaping cultural understandings of SARS-CoV-2 risk, the relative position of these communities in relation to state power and the inequality that defines the relations of one community to another that readers may find to be an especially interesting, salient and recurring theme in the chapters which follow. While Douglas’s work is seldom used as a basis for analysing the inequalities inherent to risk processes, we have sought to emphasise the utility of her work here in the way it connects many of the insights across the chapters; the useful consideration of how relationships between centre and periphery are useful in understanding how the categorising and prioritising of risks develops over time; and Douglas’s attentiveness to learning from cases, practices and knowledge structures in the Global South (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982, p. 7). The value of these themes which continue across the book is further enhanced through the range of different perspectives on risk and uncertainty which the book brings together. These range across disciplines— sociology, science and technology studies, anthropology, media studies, political science and philosophy—but moreover include varying theoretical traditions from Beck’s risk society to environmental sociology, relational theories of risk, ecofeminist theory, as well as grassroots and academic feminist perspectives on gender-based violence. That these latter perspectives (e.g. Tobías and Fernández Bouzo draw on a distinctively South American ecofeminism), alongside the standpoints of many of the authors in the book, are drawn from contexts beyond the ‘Global North-­ West’ serves to deepen, nuance and challenge dominant perspectives on uncertainty and risk which have been bolstered and blinkered by their

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specific, largely northern European, standpoints and related assumptions (Brown, 2015). In this sense the six continents represented in this book contribute far more than geographical scope; the diversity in academic traditions, and their enriching of sociologies of risk and uncertainty, is the most exciting and hopefully lasting contribution of the book.

Overview of Contributions Part I: Governing COVID-19 Using a case study of emergency measures in law and politics, and especially their implementation amid the Corona pandemic, Kritika Maheshwari examines the way the Union government in India approached the difficult balance between securing the health of the country’s population by enforcing compliance, and how and to what degree freedoms are (il)legitimately restricted for this purpose. Maheshwari notes that most public discussions regarding the uses of state power for enforcing COVID-19 measures are framed in the language of a violation of human rights, or in terms of freedom as non-interference. She suggests an additional perspective that builds on the concept of domination. Maheshwari shows that in India the absence of appropriate and non-ambiguous legislation mandating enforcement of risk-containment measures has been detrimental to protecting individuals from threats of procedurally arbitrary exercises of power. The chapter illuminates connections between this lack of legalisation and regulation to the widespread and arbitrary abuse of power in India. This has been most palpable when law enforcement secured compliance with COVID-19 response measures such as facemask wearing and curfews. The case study illustrates that restrictions of people’s rights in crisis situations require clear legislation protecting citizen rights to prevent arbitrary abuse of state power. This need is especially pressing due to the way that the arbitrary exercise of power, far from being purely random, follows existing patterns of inequality. Fernanda Sousa-Duarte examined how risk governance about ‘telework’ or ‘working from home’ was influenced by the COVID-19

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pandemic. Using the banking sector in Brazil as a case study Sousa-­ Duarte examined how the antagonistic positions of employers and unions shifted. Before COVID-19 telework was celebrated by the banks as the ‘new normal’, supporting flexible and more efficient work, but was responded to with suspicion by the unions which considered telework to be fostering deregulation and weakening workers’ protection. Amid COVID-19, telework was reshaped as an effective social distancing measure to protect workers’ health and jobs and allowed both banks and unions to reframe their policies as a means to increasing flexibility and health. Sousa-Duarte concludes by emphasising the ‘importance of investigating companies and unions’ governance of emerging risk relationships to understand country responses to COVID-19—especially in face of governance without government’. Melina Tobías and Soledad Fernández Bouzo investigated the effects that the spread of the virus and the implementation of precautionary and mandatory social lockdown measures had in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, paying particular attention to one area at the periphery of this urban expanse. In evidencing the compliance difficulties with these measures in the poorest sectors of the population, the authors show the complex inter-connections ‘between environmental, social, housing, and health access issues’. This includes the need for economic sustenance, organising and attending soup kitchens to guarantee basic food, the lack of human and material resources across primary health care centres, overcrowding and lack of access to safe water and sewage services, and the multiple burdens for women in being responsible for many of the risk mitigation activities. Building on conceptual lenses from risk studies, critical epidemiology and ecofeminism, this chapter aims to comprehensively understand the impact of the pandemic on the underprivileged neighbourhoods in the light of the pre-existing risks and vulnerabilities (social, economic, cultural, housing related and environmental) which shape the social determinants of health. Tobías and Fernández Bouzo find that a series of pre-existing risks and vulnerabilities functioned as social determinants of (poor) health, while COVID-19 followed and intensified these existing patterns of inequality. Henry Rothstein, David Demeritt, Regine Paul and Li Wang developed a comparative examination of how different governance traditions

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in China, Germany, the UK and USA shaped the responses to COVID-19. They suggested that ‘while the virus was comparable in each country, the governance challenges in responding to it varied’ systematically. They distinguished three major dimensions. First, the degree of state intervention varied between countries. In the US and Germany strong constitutional guarantees limited state interference in citizen rights while the paternalistic tradition in China supported comprehensive interference. The UK would be characterised by an ad hoc mix of convention, law and parliamentary politics. Second, they saw the state structure influencing their capacity to respond. The US and Germany with their federal structure and China and the UK with their centralised, unitary regulatory set-up resulted in different response patterns. Finally, the styles of policy making may have shaped the coherence and complementarity of measures. Pluralist policy styles in the US and UK contrasted with corporatist policy making in Germany and a kind of ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ in China.

Part II: Communicating and Interpreting COVID-19 Risk In her study on everyday life experiences of COVID-19 in Stockholm, Linda Kvarnlöf examined how participants navigated and made sense of everyday life during the initial phase of the pandemic in Sweden, where government approaches placed comparatively high emphasis on individual responsibility. Kvarnlöf understands government recommendations and restrictions as biographical structures that temporarily patterned her interviewees’ everyday lives. There was broad support for the Swedish soft strategy amongst the participants, who did not feel that they were at risk, even when they hoped, rather than being confident, about the Swedish strategy (e.g. being guided by science rather than political spin). At the same time, there were also signs that some participants experienced difficulties in applying the recommendations in everyday practice, in particular when people felt at risk themselves. There were some indications that the coronavirus and the comparatively relaxed strategy to managing the pandemic opened up a division between those who did not feel at

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risk, who welcomed the relatively light restrictions, and others who felt at risk and were worried that the measures do not go far enough. Paul Ward and colleagues described the lived experiences of 40 women in South Australia during the early COVID-19 lockdowns. Following on from earlier research with this cohort of women, aged 45–64 years, the study focused on their experiences during the first ‘lockdown’ in mid-2020, paying particular attention to how they obtained and maintained a sense of control in pandemic lives characterised by the unclear aetiology of the virus, the illness, the management via lockdowns and the future (both imagined futures and the present was leading to changed futures). Social and mass media contributed to the experience of uncertainty which was seen as having been inflated by fear mongering in social and mass media. Women searched for control within the realm of control available to them (‘I can only control what I can control’). In this way they attempted to keep things ‘normal’ or stable. Some found control in assuming that at one point they would get the coronavirus, but they were confident that they would (‘I’m likely to get it, but I’ll be okay’) have less negative health consequences, due to both their preventive hygiene and social distancing (contrasting themselves with the ‘stupid people’ in shopping centres) and health promoting activities (building mental, physical, and spiritual health) and behaviours. Brenda Focás and Esteban Zunino examined the connection between media coverage and public perceptions of this media coverage in Argentina, combining a content analysis of the media with an analysis of opinion poll data during the first half of 2020. The original steep increase and high level of media coverage in March slowly decreased over time. The strong quarantining measures were accompanied by comparatively low levels of sickness and death in many parts of the country, promoting a shift in public opinion which resulted in a strong rejection of containment measures. Meanwhile Argentinians considered that the media were overstating the crisis, and interest in the crisis and news about it decreased over time. Despite the increasing infections in the following months, coverage of the pandemic declined further in the news media. Focás and Zunino argue therefore for a nuanced picture of the agenda setting power of the media, one which is importantly shaped by the competing media

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owners and consumers, with these marketised characteristics contributing to the framing of the news. Magdalena Gil and Eduardo Undurraga examined the role and salience of quantitative modelling for political debate and decision-making in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Chile, drawing on various sources but especially interviews with the scientists involved in the expert committee that was informing the Chilean government. As with many other countries, Chile was hit hard by the pandemic and as elsewhere ‘epidemiological models have been at the center of public discussions of risk in Chile, with several controversies relating to the management, availability, and use of data’. However, there were a number of issues such as the quality of data modellers had access to, inflated expectations about the ability of models to predict pandemic development, the need to be candid about the normative decisions and assumptions informing the modelling, and the tendency for politicians to ignore scientific models. The authors found two major issues that can be learned from and that should be improved upon. On the one hand, politicians distrusted scientists and their modelling but also lacked the skills to understand the models. On the other hand, modellers had limited ability to present their models in an accessible way, including limited possibilities to share and critically discuss the implicit assumptions and decisions made in the modelling process.

 art III: Pandemic Risk—Emerging Conceptual P and Methodological Issues Dean Curran turns to Beck’s theory of world risk society and cosmopolitanisation to examine some of the transformations of the state during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on the central banks’ role in financial markets and large-scale financial interventions by nation states, Curran identifies a shift in the governance of risk from first modern approaches that sought to control them through ‘rationalized predictive rationalities’ to a ‘much more haphazard and piecemeal’ approach ‘to mitigate losses after a crisis has occurred’. Curran also argues that the ‘nation-state’s ability to effectively control the environment in which risks are created is

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continually declining. Yet, contra Beck the corresponding role of the state in managing and acting to compensate for risks in many ways actually continues to grow’. Thus, caught between the inability to transform its surrounding environment to systematically mitigate risks and, on the other hand, the continually increasing democratic demand for security, Curran describes significant shifts in the role of the state. Rolf Lidskog and Adam Standring consider one of the most immediate and pressing questions emerging from COVID-19—why has the pandemic prompted such far-reaching and rapid responses, whereas climate change and environmental degradation have not? These authors combine perspectives from environmental sociology and science and technology studies to explore these two crises in order to understand different governmental responses. They identify clear differences in terms of immediacy, visibility and spatiality while also denoting similarities. On this basis they engage with the often-neglected discussion of the long-­ term effects of the interdependency of environmental change, infectious diseases and pandemics (IPBES, 2020) and how such a perspective can improve not only our understanding of infectious diseases and pandemics, but our comprehension of society and the conditions and possibilities for meeting environmental challenges. Lidskog and Standring conclude in arguing that treating the symptoms of these crises in a disjointed and uncoordinated manner is not just unsustainable but may have the effect of hastening the arrival of the next crisis. They suggest it is important to adopt a broader view of crises to facilitate transformative change. Claudia Mitchell, Relebohile Moletsaner and Darshan Daryanani examine the intersections among social, economic, spatial and cultural risks for girls and young women participating in risk-related research in rural contexts during the COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa. These authors explore alternative interventions that could help mitigate the impacts of the lockdown measures on girls and women in poorly resourced rural settings, while working around the obstacles which make it very difficult to continue research through online methods. They start with the observation that while national interventions have focused largely on mitigating the impacts of the economic fallout of lockdown measures, interventions focusing on sex- and gender-based violence (SGBV)— often termed the ‘shadow epidemic’—under lockdown are largely

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missing or inadequate. In South Africa, reports from police authorities and from women’s shelters and hotlines highlight the negative impact that physical distancing and social isolation has had on already vulnerable girls and young women experiencing SGBV in their homes and communities. However, there are numerous ethical issues that could put vulnerable young girls and young women at further risk by participating in research or in related interventions. Mitchell and colleagues acknowledge both the vulnerabilities and assets of rural spaces and draw on reflexive ethnography in developing an ‘ethnography at a distance’. In this way the authors demonstrate insightful perspectives for ethically sensitised research in crisis situations, alongside important recommendations for policymakers in tackling SGBV amid pandemics.

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without are suffering. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/ content/8691370f-­f0b0-­44cf-­aa24-­6cfd5d28676e Tulloch, J. C., & Zinn, J. O. (2011). Risk, health and the media. Health, Risk & Society, 13(1), 1–16. Walby, S. (2020). The COVID pandemic and social theory: Social democracy and public health in the crisis. European Journal of Social Theory, 24(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431020970127 Wang, D., & Mao, Z. (2021). From risks to catastrophes: How Chinese newspapers framed the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in its early stage. Health, Risk & Society, 23(3–4), 93–110. WHO. (2020). WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19-11 March 2020. https://www.who.int/director-­general/ speeches/detail/who-­d irector-­g eneral-­s -­o pening-­remarks-­a t-­t he-­m edia-­ briefing-­on-­covid-­19%2D%2D-­11-­march-­2020 Wilkinson, I. (2010). Risk and vulnerability in everyday life. Routledge. Zaidi, R. Z., & Fordham, M. (2021). The missing half of the Sendai framework: Gender and women in the implementation of global disaster risk reduction policy. Progress in Disaster Science, 10, 100170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. pdisas.2021.100170 Zinn, J.  O. (2008a). Heading into the unknown. Health, Risk and Society, 5, 439–450. Zinn, J. O. (Ed.). (2008b). Social theories of risk and uncertainty. Blackwell. Zinn, J. O. (2010). Biography, risk and uncertainty—Is there common ground for biographical research and risk research? [59 paragraphs]. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(1), Art. 15. Zinn, J. O. (2016). Living in the Anthropocene: Towards a risk-taking society. Environmental Sociology, 2(4), 385–394. Zinn, J. O. (2020). ‘A monstrous threat’: How a state of exception turns into a ‘new normal’. Journal of Risk Research, 23(7–8), 1083–1091. Zinn, J. O. (2021). COVID-19—Towards a sociology of pandemics. Current Sociology Monograph Issue, 69. Sage. Zinn, J. O. (2021a). Introduction: Towards a sociology of pandemics. Current Sociology Monograph Issue, 69(4), 435–452. https://doi. org/10.1177/00113921211020771 Zinn, J.  O. (2021b). Conclusions: Towards a sociology of pandemics and beyond. Current Sociology Monograph Issue, 69(4), 603–617. https://doi. org/10.1177/00113921211023518

Part I Governing COVID-19

2 Responding to Covid-19 in India: Reducing Risk or Increasing Domination? Kritika Maheshwari

Introduction In times of global health crises, governments have a special obligation towards their citizens to respect, protect and promote their welfare. On 11 March 2020, after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the corona virus (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak a global pandemic, many governments around the world started responding to the needs of the hour. Some notable responses included implementing temporary and mandatory non-pharmaceutical emergency interventions under the proviso of “risk-containment measures”. These measures included, but were not limited to, nation-wide and regional lockdowns, mandatory quarantines and physical distancing, and obligating wearing of masks in public areas. The stringency, duration and

K. Maheshwari (*) Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. R. Brown, J. O. Zinn (eds.), Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95167-2_2

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scope of these measures varied across countries, but their enforcement was intended to achieve several public health safety goals. Some of these goals included mitigation of the global risk of human-to-human corona virus spread, ensuring protection of population and individual health in both the long and short term, and preventing the increase of infections and fatalities, amongst others. The imposition of these measures was initially met with harsh criticism, scepticism and sometimes even conspiracy theories. While some sceptics doubted their apparent effectiveness, others pointed out the harmful impact these measures were starting to have globally such as rampant violation of human rights, increase in stigmatisation and discrimination of certain groups, as well as the impact on privacy and censorship (Amnesty International, 2021). Another major concern that was persistently and sometimes even fiercely voiced—both in academic and public discussions—pertained to the impact these measures had on individual freedom. For instance, several anti-lockdown movements emerged around the world to voice opposition against the restrictions imposed on people’s freedom to move, travel, socialise, organise, access public and private goods, and continue non-essential work and businesses.1 Some political leaders even publicly announced their opposition to forcing people to wear masks as they “want people to have certain freedom”.2 While risk-containment measures are deemed necessary and important for tackling the pandemic, the concerns listed above are quite serious in nature. They pose several challenges for governments such as fostering public acceptability and compliance with these measures, ensuring and promoting democratic justifiability of imposing them on their citizens, preventing additional harms such as human rights violations from occurring, providing people with necessary resources and compensation for the harms and losses they may have incurred, to name but a few. How democratic governments ought to address these challenges—efficiently and ethically—remains a very difficult question and not one that I aim to 1  Over the course of the pandemic, a number of anti-lockdown protests emerged in cities like London, Leipzig, Rotterdam and Berlin to name a few. 2  In an interview with an American News channel, ex-US president Donald Trump expressed his disagreement over the usefulness of mandatory mask-wearing policies on grounds that individuals should have certain freedoms.

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resolve in the following chapter. Instead, my aim is to add to this list by introducing a different and often overlooked issue: whether, and in what ways can the  government’s enforcement of risk-containment measures conflict with preservation and promotion of a particular kind of freedom we value and care about as citizens, namely, freedom understood as non-domination?3 During times of emergency like the pandemic itself, governments are often seen as exercising “exceptional power” when they impose measures like mandatory quarantine and lockdowns over their citizens. However, given the state of growing urgency in responding to the pandemic, there is a worry that governments may resort to exercising their exceptional power arbitrarily. When power is exercised by states or even by non-state actors arbitrarily over a person or group, that is, at their own will in the absence of appropriate institutional checks and balances, neo- republican theorists argue that we are confronted with a threat to our freedom as non-domination (Pettit, 1997; Lovett & Pettit, 2009). Accordingly, what matters to justifiability of governments imposing risk-containment measures, amongst other things, is that their imposition does not constitute or entail wrongful exercise of arbitrary power—–or so I will argue in this chapter. In what follows, I explore how the notion of freedom as non-­ domination can contribute to existing discussions surrounding the ethics of pandemics and, in particular, the ethics of imposing and regulating risk-containment measures. I will develop these themes through five remaining sections in this chapter. In “Introduction” section, I offer a brief overview of the theoretical framework I will use, namely, a neo-republican conception of freedom as non-domination developed by Frank Lovett (2010, 2012). Next, I motivate the relevance of non-­domination to the current discussion in “Freedom as Non-domination” section. In “A Neo-Republican Outlook on Risk-Containment Measures” section, I discuss a case study focussing on India’s early response to the Covid-19 pandemic and, in particular, zoom in on the legislation underlying the 3  Note that I am focussing on a very specific aspect or feature of states’ response during the pandemic. The scope of state governance and jurisdiction in addressing the pandemic goes beyond making decisions about risk-containment measures.

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risk-containment measures imposed by the Union government. Next, in “India’s Lockdown 2020: A Case Study” section, I present my argument for why imposition of these measures could be considered procedurally arbitrary and, thereby, potentially dominating for some, whilst intensifying existing domination for others. “Problem of Domination” section concludes my discussion. Before proceeding, however, I should highlight some important limitations of the discussion that follows. First, I am not able to cover all of the different possible ways of thinking about domination in the context of the pandemic. While I intend mainly to highlight the idea that states and citizens ought to recognise freedom as non-domination, this is only one amongst many other important normative and political ideals which are pertinent to risk-containment measures during times of crisis. Thus, a focus on non-domination is not meant to provide an exhaustive moral or political analysis of the situation. Second, the discussion is not meant as an argument against enforcing risk-containment measures, but as an argument against specific ways of enforcing and regulating these measures that threaten domination of citizens, thereby undermining their pro tanto ethical and political justifiability to those who are forced to comply with them. And finally, I draw upon examples from India’s response to Covid-19 only because they seemed useful for illuminating the main ideas of this chapter, with space limitations restricting me from extending the discussion to other cases.

Freedom as Non-domination It is commonplace in discussions of political philosophy to distinguish between two contrasting notions of freedom: one as non-interference and the other as non-domination.4 The former notion stems from a liberal tradition of thinking about freedom. It concerns the absence of actual interferences with one’s possible options for actions, where the interference can be external or internal (Berlin, 1969; Carter, 1999; Kramer, 4  I leave out the discussion of other notions of freedom such as positive freedom (Taylor, 1979), freedom of the will or metaphysical freedom, freedom as non-frustration or non-interference (Berlin, 1969)

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2003). On this notion, to be free is to not have one’s options interfered with. The latter notion stems from a (neo)republican tradition of thinking about freedom. It concerns not only the absence of actual interference, but also the absence of the “possibility of arbitrary interference” (Pettit, 1997, p.  149). In contrast to freedom as non-interference, the notion of freedom as non-domination is a relational one: what matters is not only the outcome, that is, whether or not an individual or a collective agent actually interfered with you, but the fact that someone you stand in a socio-political relationship has the mere capacity to interfere with you by exercising their power at their own will or whim, with impunity. To be a free person in the republican sense, then, is to be “one who does not live under the arbitrary will or domination of others” (Lovett & Pettit, 2009, p. 12). Someone who is dominated lacks the assurance that their actions, decisions or choices are secure from arbitrary interference. This has negative consequences for the person insofar as it affects their well-being and creates uncertainty that makes planning and living one’s life difficult (Pettit, 1997). Others think that the negatives of domination go beyond that—it counts as a failure to respect the moral standing of the dominated. Being in a relation of domination forces people to adjust their behaviour and ingratiate themselves in order to avoid being interfered with, even if their dominator chooses not to interfere, or acts in ways that in fact promote the well-being of the dominated. To be dominated, then, is clearly morally problematic for the above reasons. But what exactly qualifies as domination? Capturing its precise meaning is a difficult task, and there is a large variety of accounts on offer (Pettit, 1997; Lovett, 2010; Laborde, 2008). For the purposes of this chapter, I follow Frank Lovett’s influential account of domination as it covers key general features of domination. According to Lovett, an agent is in a relation of domination with someone, when three conditions are met: 1. Inequalities in power: Relations that are characteristics of domination involve agents who hold superior or greater “social power” over others who—relative to them—occupy a subordinate position. As long as one enjoys the unconstrained capacity to wield their superior power over others in the absence of any external or systematic constraints, the relationship remains problematic. Some paradigm examples of

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such relationships include dictators passing laws that force a particular group to wear badges or else face risk of punishment, or slave-owners locking their slaves on the condition that they would otherwise not be allowed to eat. In both cases and ones alike, one agent has the capacity to wield power over another that entails a specific ability to control those under their subordination, even if one never chooses to do so. 2. Dependency: Relations of domination are characterised by problematic relations of dependency. For instance, a woman in an abusive marriage is more vulnerable to domination in a society that bans divorce since she cannot leave the relationship with her husband. Similarly, in other paradigmatic cases of domination, such as ones involving slaves and slave-owners, the former are in a relation of domination with the latter insofar as they are trapped in such a relationship, and any attempts to free themselves come with extreme social costs such as the threat of being killed, tortured or punished. Although relations of dependency are not necessarily dominating (think of a child and parent relationship), they amplify domination in situations where an individual cannot extricate themselves out of the relationship without facing high costs (Lovett, 2010). 3. Arbitrariness: Inequalities in power and dependency are necessary but not sufficient condition for domination. A relation of domination is marked by an individual’s or a collective’s arbitrary use of their power in the absence of any appropriate external or systematic constraint on her will, even if she decides never to use it. Exactly what kind of external constraint makes power less arbitrary?5 On procedural accounts like Lovett’s, power is arbitrary if it fails to be “constrained by effective rules, procedures or goals that are common knowledge to all persons or groups concerned” (ibid., p. 101).6 For the exercise of power to be less arbitrary, and thereby non-dominating, it must be procedurally constrained.

 For criticism of Lovett’s account of arbitrariness, c.f. Arnold and Harris (2017).  In contrast, on some substantive accounts, theorists understand the arbitrariness of power as the extent to which it fails to be controlled to ensure that it respects the “politically avowable interests” of those over whom it is exercisable (Pettit, 1997). 5 6

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As an illustrative example, consider the regulation of police power (Smith, 2013). Police personnel and law enforcement authorities at large have considerable superior power over citizens. They enjoy this power by virtue of the conventions of the institutions they are part of, amongst other things, such as differential social status, training and expertise. However, law enforcement authorities and agencies do not dominate, at least in principle, if their power is constrained and held publicly accountable via a number of formal or informal mechanisms or procedures. These may include clearly defined public laws that delineate the appropriate scope of their power, independent judiciaries for oversight and evaluating use and misuse of power, external and internal investigators and citizen boards and committees. These constraints play an instrumental role in facilitating citizen’s knowledge of exactly where they stand with respect to those who have power over them. Moreover, these constraints allow individuals to develop and pursue their life plans based on reliable expectations of how and when power may be exercised over them, and whether and how they should guard against it. Thus, these procedural devices must be part of common knowledge, their various provisions carefully instantiated, and their enforcement must be consistent and impartial. They should, most importantly, be effective and reliable. When can we say that procedural constraints on power are reliable and effective? On Lovett’s account, effectiveness is a measure of the extent to which constraints on power actually restrict how that power is exercised (2012, pp. 139–140). That is, the state is effectively constrained to wield its power in a particular manner if it is common knowledge that the chances of them wielding their power in that manner are relatively high. By contrast, reliability is a measure of how robustly effective the constraints on power are. That is, a constraint is reliably effective insofar as it is common knowledge that the chance that it will be respected in constraining one’s power is high in a suitably wide range of nearby possible worlds (ibid, p. 139). Effective and reliable procedural constraints on power thus play a crucial role in setting boundaries for use of power and keeping a check on its exercise. Being subject to power that is in fact effectively and reliably constrained is partly constitutive of what it is to be a free citizen or to be

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part of a minimally just society. As we’ll see later, it is this lack of effective and reliable procedural constraints that underlies the case for domination in India’s enforcement of risk-containment measures during the pandemic.

 Neo-Republican Outlook A on Risk-Containment Measures With this brief overview of freedom as non-domination, we may ask: why focus on the republican ideal of non-domination in justifying enforcement of risk-containment measures during the pandemic?7 There are at least three reasons.8 The first reason comes from the nature of power exercised during the pandemic. Emergency powers are often a deviation from the usual powers of the state—often to the extent that sometimes permits them to take actions without complying with statutory duties they are otherwise obligated to comply with or simply take actions that restrict valuable freedoms and violate rights for the sake of collective goods like public health safety. However, with great power comes great worries of which a republican account warns us: enactment of such unusual and exceptional authority often risks constituting “tyranny” or “dictatorship”. As Laborde (2020) suggests, increase in a state’s power to interfere during emergencies like pandemic does not preclude or diminish the potential of this power from consolidating or concentrating in the hands of a select few, just like in situations where the rule of dictators was justified as a temporary concentration of power during war with the aim of releasing that power and restoring liberties after the war. Thus, just and democratic institutions must abide by the political goal of ensuring that individuals are protected from the arbitrary or uncontrolled power of their government even during emergencies.

7  Besides Lovett’s, there are distinct conceptions of domination available in the literature. The discussion that follows from here may differ depending on which conception one adopts. 8  This list is in no way exhaustive. Due to space constraints I refrain from discussing more reasons.

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The second reason comes from the extent of power exercised during the pandemic. In present-day constitutional democracies, it is well acknowledged that states exercise considerable power over its citizenry. Situations of emergencies like terrorist attacks, war, pandemics and so on call upon states to exercise considerably even more power that allows them to interfere in various aspects of one’s life. The very fact that states can force individuals to comply with mandatory stay-at-home orders or potentially criminalising the ordinary act of entering a shop without a mask is illustrative of this. In ordinary circumstances, a just democratic state or any of its member cannot wield such power absent proper justification. One impact of this is that when states enforce these measures, it has the element of them making sure people do what they deem necessary, namely, act or behave in ways that ensure that these measures are in fact effective. People are nudged into changing their behaviour in ways that echoes the ingratiation aspect of domination, as observed in paradigmatic master-slave relationship whereby the slave is forced into servility towards the powerful in order to avoid being interfered with. Obeying lockdown rules and staying home or wearing masks in public could, but need not, count as ingratiation if one is forced to do so in fear of being violently attacked by state authorities if they don’t follow their rules. The final reason comes from the nature of emergency itself. It is well acknowledged that the pandemic is characterised by ever-changing, unprecedented situations. Given the urgency and the short time frame for tackling newly arising problems, new rules, regulations, measures, plans of action are often needed to be decided upon quickly under conditions of uncertainty. The time pressure along with the evolving and unpredictable nature of the situation means that the legislative frameworks for internal checks on how these actions are being authorised and undertaken might be easily outdated or rendered unhelpful, and the time and effort taken to update, revise or review them is often too long and too much, respectively. This holds the potential of undermining the very mechanisms of contestability and accountability of government’s actions which, from a republican outlook, is essential for citizens to check that their exercise of power is in fact non-arbitrary.

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India’s Lockdown 2020: A Case Study So, might there be a reason for thinking that a government’s enforcement of measures regarding strict lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic could have posed a threat to our freedom as non-domination? To answer this question, I will make use of a case study. In what follows, I begin with an overview of the constitutional legislature underlying the use of executive powers9 by the Union government of India in imposing national risk-containment measures during the Covid-19 pandemic. On 24 March 2020, state governments and district authorities, on the direction of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, ordered a nation-wide lockdown for 21 days as a preventive measure against the pandemic, with further extensions and easing of restrictions in later months. Other measures included closing of all non-essential governmental, commercial and private establishments, hospitality services and business, industries, transportation, public educational institutions as well as places of worship. Two legislative pieces in particular, namely the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 (EDA), and the Disaster Management Act, 2005 (DMA), were used as the statutory basis for imposing these measures and laying out guidelines for the suspension of services and freedom of movement. Both these laws are intended to arm the Union government with powers required for addressing the pandemic and, at the same time, serve as an internal check constraining their power by defining their scope and nature. Thus, evaluation of the risk-containment measures imposed by the government requires that we briefly look into the details of the two legislative components that formed the statutory basis of their imposition.10 Consider the EDA. It is a British colonial Act with only four statutes. It was enacted in 1897 by a colonial power under an imperial institutional set-up. It enabled the Victorian government at the time to impose temporary measures to be observed by the public during the on-going 9  Note that India did not declare an official state of emergency and, hence, did not employ emergency powers. 10  Throughout my focus is on Union’s power and exercise thereof rather than the State governments because the lockdown was imposed as part of executive power exercised by the Union. Generally, Union and State governments have executive power for anything that Parliament and State Assembly have power to legislate on as mentioned in Articles 73 and 162 of the Indian Constitution.

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plague. The broader objective of the EDA is to “to provide for the better prevention of the spread of Dangerous Epidemic Diseases” (Government of India, 1897, p. 1). In its current formulation, it specifies the power of both the Union and the state governments to take special measures and prescribe regulations when faced with the outbreak of epidemic diseases. The EDA, however, does not define what an epidemic disease is, let alone providing sufficient or necessary conditions for determining whether the Covid-19 pandemic itself qualifies as one. At the time of its enactment, the Act only made provisions to empower the central government for: inspection of any bus or train or goods vehicle or ship or vessel or aircraft leaving or arriving at any land port or aerodrome. (Article 2A, p. 3)

Moreover, the provisions do not explicitly state that the powers allowed for by the EDA can be used in violation of any other law under the current constitution system of present-day India, nor do they establish clear roles of various levels of the government, nor do they delineate the rights and responsibilities of the public in a pandemic (Bhatia, 2020; Ghose,2020;  Ghose & Jetley, 2020). In the absence of these concrete features, the EDA has been widely deemed insufficient as a directive tool for precisely how and to what extent the Union is allowed to act in responding to the pandemic.11 For now, I refer to this as the problem of action guidance. To make up for these gaps, the Union government referred to the Disaster Management Act of 2005 (DMA). This statute provides the action plan or a legal framework for taking measures to deal with a “disaster” at the national, state and district levels. Disaster here refers to a: catastrophe, mishap, calamity or grave occurrence in any area, arising from natural or man-made causes, or by accident or negligence which results in substantial loss of life or human suffering or damage to, and destruction of, property, or damage to, or degradation of, environment, and is of such a

11

 This point has been recently acknowledged in the Standing Committee Report of 2020.

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nature or magnitude as to be beyond the coping capacity of the community of the affected area. (Article 2d, p. 4)

The focus of the DMA, then, is on specifying plans and policies for combating disasters like earthquakes, fires, floods, but not public health emergency. It only specifies how to delegate power for restricting people’s movement, deploying military power, requiring disaster experts to provide advice and assistance for rescue and relief, coordinating with international help and so on only when a “disaster” strikes. Recognising that pandemics like Covid-19 are out of its direct purview, the Indian “Ministry of Home Affairs” abruptly declared the pandemic as a “notified disaster” (rather than an epidemic or a pandemic) to allow for provisions of the DMA to apply under “Conclusion” section of the Act, as well as for delegating powers to different ministries, departments, state and union territory governments, enabling them to act under the DMA. Some criticised this move as the government “prompting an ad-hoc response and stretching available legal provisions to authorise improvised executive action in the absence of proper public health emergency legislation” (Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, 2020, p. 4). Maybe “necessity knows no bounds”, as the saying goes—the state may be justified in expanding its power and further stretch the existing legal constraints to address an unprecedented situation like Covid-19 when existing laws fall short. The state could, in principle, use ejusdem generis to justify that “catastrophe, mishap, calamity or grave occurrence in any area, arising from natural or man-made causes” (Article 2d, p.  4) extends the scope of DMA to pandemics such as Covid-19. However, given the nature, complexity and severity of a public health disease outbreak, such an extension would seem to function beyond the usual conceptual and practical boundaries of the legislation. For instance, catastrophic events like disasters usually involve large-­ scale destruction of infrastructure and displacement of people, whereas the pandemic has constituted the spreading of illness and breaking down of healthcare systems, amongst other things. Moreover, disasters are usually short-lived localised events with trickle-down effects at a global level,

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whereas the pandemic was and continues to be a long-lived globalised phenomenon requiring extensive regional, national and international coordination and response to contain the spread. These differences give us a prima facie reason to think that the directives issued by the DMA do not strictly dictate the means and mechanisms required for responding to the pandemic, and therefore, its applicability remains suspect. For now, I refer these failings as the problem of commensurability. Before engaging with these two problems, let me briefly note how the lack of directives and concrete guidance played out practically in the actual imposition of risk-containment measures. The 21-day lockdown, for instance, was announced four hours before its implementation, giving very little time for citizens to prepare. While the lockdown had far-­ reaching effects on the society at large, its biggest impact was felt by nearly 40 million migrant workers, who were instantly left stranded with little food and financial relief from the government.12 According to the Parliamentary Standing Commission Report (2020), the sudden imposition of the lockdown caused unprecedented economic disruption, fear and anxiety among these workers, leading to large-scale movements of migrants back to their home states, as well as increases in domestic violence and the trafficking of women and children.13 Moreover, the effects of ill-preparedness were also made evident in the healthcare sector. The government failed in providing support to public and private hospitals to deal with supply shortages of beds, ventilators, support staff, among many limitations. Most importantly, lack of proper equipment like PPE kits led to a number of health and sanitation workers on the front line—who tend to be from some of the most marginalised castes—to be put at higher risk of becoming infected.14 The aftermath of the first lockdown triggered ripple effects that are still unfolding. At the time of writing (Spring 2021), the current estimates for total Covid-19

12  https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/32-33/commentary/reverse-migration-labourers-amidstcovid-­19.html 13  https://www.epw.in/journal/2020/44/editorials/pandemic-eyes-world-bank-and-imf.html 14  https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/making-the-private-sector-care-for-public-health/article31241291.ece

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infection cases that were reported have crossed 30 million and counting, with over 3 million deaths.15

A Problem of Domination So far, I’ve noted that the two-part framework utilised by the Indian Union Home Ministry in orchestrating a national-level pandemic response suffers from two problems: the problem of commensurability and the problem of action guidance. The former is the problem of failure of legal statutes to be proper or appropriate pieces of legislation for handling the pandemic—partly because they do not directly apply in the context of the pandemic, and partly because their provisions are too vague and unclear. The latter problem, which is a symptom of the former, underlies how the statutes have failed in offering the required legal guidance and backing of precisely what powers the state can or cannot employ in responding to a fast-changing and unprecedented public health emergency. In what follows, I argue that both problems, when considered together, constitute an overarching problem of domination.16 Recall that on Lovett’s (2012) account, power is arbitrary and thereby problematic to the extent that its exercise is not externally constrained by reliable and effective rule of law, procedures or goals. So, we can now ask, is the arbitrariness condition satisfied in the Indian case so described? Here I return to the problem of commensurability. It highlights how the content and scope of both the DMA and EDA neither make provisions for, nor legally sanction the various risk-containment measures imposed by Indian government during the pandemic, such as the quarantine, lockdown, restriction of movement, shutting down of essential businesses. Despite new amendments to the EDA that took force from 22  https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/india-covid-cases.html  It is usually acknowledged that during an emergency like the pandemic, states can deviate to some extent from the rule of law, along with bypassing ordinary processes of law making and suspending liberties of individuals (Fatovic, 2020). In fact, a number of countries including Spain, France, New Zealand, Estonia, Latvia to name a few declared a national state of emergency to tackle Covid-19 outbreak. In the case of India, however, the measures were not implemented as part of a state-declared emergency because the Indian constitution provides no provision for declaring an emergency during a public health crisis). 15 16

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April 2020, nearly a month after its enactment, the scope of the Union’s executive powers remained limited, yet extended beyond this limitation in its actual exercise. For instance, new changes included extending the Union government’s power to take measures “as it deems fit and prescribe regulations for the inspection of any bus or train or goods vehicle or ship or vessel or aircraft leaving or arriving at any land port or aerodrome” (Article 2A, my emphasis in italics). This extended power did not cover the regulation of private individuals using their personal modes of transport—even though the lockdown measures implemented under its enactment restricted such movement.17 Moreover, these directive powers did not, still, allow for imposition of lockdown, social distancing and isolation measures, stay-­ at-­home orders at large that was deemed necessary as first immediate response to the pandemic. In these regards, the EDA (together with the DMA) is quite unlike comprehensive legislation enacted by other countries in responding to the pandemic. For instance, the Public Health Service Act (1944) used by the United States, or the Emergency Management Act (2005) used by Australia, or the Coronavirus Act (2020) used by the United Kingdom, or the Infectious Disease Regulations (2020) used by Singapore, legally authorises their respective governments to respond to a public health emergency like Covid-19; determines when the emergency exists; and clearly establishes the discretionary power and authority required at various levels for regulating, intervening and assisting in a range of areas for limiting transmission of the disease, closure of institutions, power to restrict gatherings, assistance to healthcare industry, and the like. By contrast, power exercised by India’s Union government in imposing risk-containment measures has been over and beyond what the enacted statutes have allowed for. What do we make of this from the standpoint of domination? It seems clear that the statutes themselves neither legitimise the exercise of the state’s power in imposing the lockdowns, nor statutorily back it, nor place any limits on its scope and extent. Moreover,  More recently, a review of the DMA published by the Government of India in 2013 confirmed that the existing legislation, policy and institutional arrangements within the scope of DMA are “not conducive for carrying out the tasks it has been mandated to perform under the Act” (Report of the Task Force 2013, p. xviii).

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we might question whether and how legislations that are in principle intended to guide state action in circumstances pertaining to threats of “disasters” can also adequately and legally guide and check the exercise of power in the case of the current pandemic. As an effective constraint, the statutes themselves do not procedurally constrain the power exercised simply because they do not apply in the context. As a reliable constraint, they fail to ensure that imposition of these measures, viz. exercise of unauthorised power, procedurally arbitrary prevents or protects people from being vulnerable to further domination. The state and various state authorities can thereby interfere, at will and with relative impunity, in the exercise of the basic freedoms of people. This is not just a theoretical concern but, as we’ll see, one that was also practically instantiated. At this juncture, one might object that the inapplicability or inappropriateness of the legislative statutes for responding to the pandemic makes the enactment of the statutes arbitrary, and not the power exercised by the state under their purview. This objection, however, risks confusing distinct understandings of arbitrariness that apply to two different objects of concern—one in the sense of being “random” that applies to the former, and the other in Lovett’s sense as described that applies to the latter. It is one thing to say that the statutes were arbitrarily enacted to handle the pandemic, barring any justification. But it is another thing to say that power exercised in imposing lockdowns is procedurally arbitrary when it is used in the absence of effective and reliable rules of law that are supposed to serve as legislative system of checks and balances on its exercise. In the present case of Indian lockdown in March 2020, the following statement holds true: enacted statutes failed to be effective and reliable checks on constraining executive power and its exercise, and power, as a matter of fact, has been arbitrarily exercised in the absence of appropriate laws constraining and regulating its exercise. This makes the Union’s action of enforcing strict lockdown worrying from the lens of freedom as non-domination. Another sense in which the statutes in question might be considered as contributing towards domination has to do with their lacking specific virtues. In republican contexts, a rule of law is characterised as embodying or exhibiting certain formal qualities or specific virtues such as

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generality, clarity and consistency, amongst others (Lovett, 2020). As noted earlier, both the DMA and EDA fail in these respects. While the vagueness and lack of clarity are certainly objectionable features of these statutes, they are not unique in this regard. It is widely accepted that no legal systems ever live up to the ideal of a perfect law. Some degree of vagueness and indeterminacy in law is inescapable (Fatovic, 2020). Moreover, we cannot demand legal regulations to be too specific—if they were too specific, it might make it harder to apply them when the situation at hand changes rapidly and the law takes time to be updated. This brings me to the second problem, namely, the problem of action guidance. Even if we accept that legal systems might fall short in fulfilling the formal or substantive requirements of the rule of law, we might still object to how much room this creates for exercising discretion without any restraint. As the enacted laws are ambiguous over how and what kind of power can be exercised in regulation or monitoring of these measures and individual’s compliance with them, it created space for state or local state authorities’ immense discretion as to what kind of measures they can take. Take, for instance, the EDA. The Act allows the state to: take, or require or empower any person to take, such measures and, by public notice, prescribe such temporary regulations to be observed by, the public or by any person or class of persons as it shall deem necessary to prevent the outbreak of such disease or the spread thereof, and may ­determine in what manner and by whom any expenses incurred (including compensation if any) shall be defrayed. (p. 2)

As noted earlier, there is no clarity over what constitutes a “disease” and whether Covid-19 qualifies as one. Even if definitional issues regarding what qualifies as a disaster or a pandemic and, accordingly, what comes under the scope of the EDA or DMA can be set to one side, they still entail significant practical problems. For instance, the provisions for ordering isolation and quarantine measures are not specified in these statutes, and there are no applicable constraints on controlling or overlooking interferences with fundamental human rights and freedoms once the law is in place. Furthermore, the Act authorises “any person” to exercise power and pass any regulations they deem fit, thus equipping the state with significant

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discretionary space and reactionary powers, which can be employed in any way government ministers want, even if they choose not to do so. Evidently, this is problematic from a republican perspective: it suggests constraints on power do not necessarily generate reliable expectations about its exercise and increase the risk of procedural arbitrariness. As an illustration, consider the following. In addition to the EDA and DMA, restrictions imposed by the Union government were complemented with provisions under India’s Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). The CrPC is the main piece of legislation on procedure for investigating crime; regulating individual conduct; determining guilt, innocence or punishment of the accused; and collection of evidence. The full extent of the measures imposed by the government at the local level came into force under the provisions of the CrPC. For instance, Sections 151 and 129 of the code empower the police to arrest those found in violation of the lockdown without any warrant and to use civil force for dispersing unlawful gatherings. Meanwhile Section 197 grants local governments wider impunity for any acts done in the discharge of their official duty. While those deemed to be in violation of the lockdown can be lawfully prosecuted under appropriate provisions of the CrPC, the increased impunity of police offers undermines the security of individuals from the use of excessive force against them. However, what involves excessive force or what constitutes violation of the lockdown is left to the discretion of what the state authority deems necessary and appropriate. In many states in India, the police were reportedly targeting people for venturing out to buy essential goods or medicines or travelling to go back to their homes, often beating them with sticks, assaulting them and, in certain instances, forcing them to crawl on the road.18 In some instances, the police chose push-ups as a form of punishment to publicly shame violators, while other state leaders threatened them with “shoot at sight” orders if they continued to breach lockdown rules (Lasania, 2020). In two particularly tragic incidents, an essential service provider was shot dead, and two shopkeepers were tortured and beaten by the police for not complying with the lockdown

18  h t t p s : / / q z . c o m / i n d i a / 1 8 2 6 3 8 7 / i n d i a s - c o r o n a v i r u s - l o c k d ow n - b r i n g s - p o l i c e brutality-to-the-fore/

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measures.19 Worse still, the EDA in principle gives protection to these police officials implicated in the misuse and abuse of power: Protection to persons acting under Act. No suit or other legal proceeding shall lie Against any person for anything done or in good faith intended to be done under this Act. (Article 4, p. 5)

The arbitrariness in exercise of power was realised in different ways, too. Consider how discretion permitted under the EDA posed a serious threat to violation of digital privacy of individuals. It is a well-known fact that, to-date, India lacks proper legislation governing data protection and privacy in general. The EDA too makes no provision for providing security or ensuring deterrence against arbitrary interferences involving infringement of an individual’s right to privacy. In the absence of strict laws to protect right to digital privacy, and in the absence of statutes that sanction and overlook the legality of measures such as digital contract tracing, the government released the “Aarogya Setu App” in order to tackle the increase in Covid-19 cases, making it mandatory to use for citizens living in containment areas and government and private sector employees. The app allowed authorities to collect sensitive medical information and upload it on a government-owned and operated server, providing this data to persons carrying out medical and administrative interventions necessary to tackle a rise in infection cases. However, a number of problems immediately surfaced: one, the app was neither legally sanctioned nor embedded within adequate legal framework designed with clear procedures or guidelines regarding privacy and security20; two, experts criticised the app for having technical flaws that allowed the government to share the data with practically anyone it wants; three, the app does not inform users how the data, that is collected every 15 minutes, is being used. In the absence of any legal constraints, individuals have no assurance that their data is not be used for monitoring and surveilling 19  https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/man-beaten-in-delhi-on-suspicionof-conspiracy-to-spread-covid-19-6354586/ 20  C.f. Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011. Also see, Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011.

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their movements. In one particular incident involving privacy breach, the state government of Kerala was caught in a legal battle for entering into a contract with an American firm for collating and handling data of 175,000 people under quarantine without taking their individual consent, and risking sharing details of their symptoms and underlying health conditions with pharmaceutical companies. As the above examples show, even unclear and non-specified laws like the EDA and DMA can be implicated in domination when they enhance discretion insofar as state authorities are able to utilise the lack of clarity or vagueness in adhering to the law or expanding their power as they see fit. This also has the dominating effect of failing to provide security against future illegitimate arbitrary interferences. From the republican point of view, this is highly worrisome in the light of the disturbances brought about in people’s lives, especially for those who belong to the most vulnerable section of the society. Below I explore an example. A few weeks after the Indian government imposed the lockdown in March 2020, reports of spreading of the virus linking it to a large gathering of a Muslim religious group (called Tablighi Jamaat) in New Delhi flooded the news.21 Various state authorities including the Indian health ministry blamed the members of the minority group for their failure to comply with risk-containment measures. Soon after, powerful dominant groups, including state and non-state actors, engaged in anti-Muslim hatred, targeted violence, social boycotting, discrimination, openly lynching Muslim individuals, spreading false information about them being super-spreaders, accusing them of inciting “corona terrorism”,22 forcing Muslims out of their homes on suspicion of being coronavirus carriers, denying them treatment on the grounds of their religion,23 attacking mosques as well as banning them from entering certain neighbourhoods. By contrast, similar religious gatherings around the time of the lockdown organised and attended by those belonging to powerful  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/world/asia/india-coronavirus-muslims-bigotry.html  https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/18/indias-steps-contain-covid-19-have-failedcurb-anti-muslim-rhetoric 23  https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/tablighi-jamaat-india-muslims-coronavirus.amp 21

22

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Hindu religious groups were not only excused but did not receive any political or media notice—let alone violent treatment. Looking back at Lovett’s conditions for domination, members of this minority group, then, already live in structurally dominating relationships with those who have superior power over them, for their dominators enjoy the capacity to interfere with them at their own discretion. They already suffer from a number of historical harms done to them at the hands of powerful religious groups and fundamentalist political parties on communal grounds. They live in a socio-political environment where antiMuslim propaganda, violence, discrimination, marginalisation and stigmatisation are rampant. They do not enjoy equal social status, and their lives are constantly at risk of harm bereft of any assurances or security that they will not be interfered with. Moreover, they lack the power to participate, or to voice their opposition or contest any action or policy— even ones issued in response to the pandemic. Enforcement of risk-­ containment measures with an arbitrary legal basis thus has a compounding effect for these vulnerable classes: not only are they subject to dominating risk-containment policies, but their existing vulnerability to both public and private domination is also intensified during their enforcement. Even though we might think the lockdown itself is intended to serve legitimate goals, namely, saving people from becoming infected and preventing the health crisis from worsening, this does not guarantee that such measures will not be used as a political tool by state and non-state dominators to exercise abusive and exploitative control over those powerless groups who find themselves in pre-existing relationship of domination with the state and other powerful groups.  In due course, depending on how the pandemic unfolds, the state may be required to impose even more aggressive or drastic measures and punishments on the citizens with much higher degrees of severity and intensity to tackle the pandemic. Given this possibility, there is a legitimate worry that both the statutes will simply fall short in delineating and legitimising the powers of relevant state and non-state authorities and the government may expand its power still further unconstrained by the two enacted statutes. Without proper limits and appropriate procedures of redress, the lawfulness, or lack thereof, of executive authority exercised will continue to fail in serving the ends of non-domination  for all citizens equally.

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Conclusions In this chapter, I’ve tried to achieve two things. First, I explained why ethical and political justifiability of risk-containment measures during Covid-19 can be assessed through the lens of domination. Using India’s response to the pandemic as my case study, I’ve argued how an absence of appropriate and concrete legislation mandating enforcement of risk-­ containment measures can be a source of domination. Second, I explained that thinking about enforcement of risk-containment measures through the lens of non-domination brings to light concerns about protecting individuals from becoming vulnerable to domination, as well as intensifying domination of those who already suffer. Addressing these concerns in the times of pandemic is significant insofar as governments should aim to promote and preserve the free status of citizens, establish and uphold institutional and legal structures that recognise and respect equal status of all citizens, remove or replace the conditions of mastery that might seep in through legal loopholes, amongst other things.

References Amnesty International. (2021). Amnesty international report 2020/21. [online]. Retrieved May 15, 2021, from http://amnesty.org Arnold, S., & Harris, J. (2017). What is arbitrary power? Journal of Political Power, 10(1), 55–70. Berlin, I. (1969). Two concepts of liberty. In Four essays on liberty. Oxford University Press. Bhatia, G. (2020). An executive emergency: India’s response to covid-19. [Blog] Verfassungsblog. Retrieved December 19, 2020, from https://verfassungsblog. de/an-­executive-­emergency-­indias-­response-­to-­covid-­19/ Carter, I. (1999). A measure of freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Fatovic, C. (2020). Emergencies and the rule of law. In Oxford research encyclopedia of politics. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228637.013.93. Ghose, S. (2020). Is the national lockdown in India constitutionally valid?. The Wire. [online] Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://thewire.in/law/ is-­the-­national-­lockdown-­in-­india-­constitutionally-­valid

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Ghose, S., & Jetley, R. (2020). Does the constitution allow Modi to declare a national emergency over COVID-19?. The Wire. [online]. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://thewire.in/law/can-­an-­1897-­law-­ empower-­t he-­m odern-­i ndian-­s tate-­t o-­d o-­w hats-­n eeded-­t o-­f ight-­ an-­epidemic Government of India. (1897). The epidemic diseases act, 1897 (PDF). India Code, National Informatics Centre. Kramer, M. (2003). The quality of freedom. Oxford Scholarship Online. Laborde, C. (2020). Liberty in the time of corona. [Blog] The Oxford University Politics Blog. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://blog.politics.ox. ac.uk/liberty-­in-­the-­time-­of-­corona/ Laborde, C. (2008). Critical republicanism: The hijab controversy and political philosophy. Oxford University Press. Lasania, Y. (2020). Will be forced to issue shoot at sight orders if people defy lockdown: KCR. Live Mint, [online]. Retrieved December 18, 2020, from https://www.livemint.com/news/india/will-­be-­forced-­to-­issue-­shoot-­at-­ sight-­orders-­if-­people-­defy-­lockdown-­kcr/amp-­11585065505918.html Lovett, F. (2010). A general theory of domination & justice (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. Lovett, F. (2012). What counts as arbitrary power? Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 137–152. Lovett, F. (2020). A republican argument for the rule of law. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13698230.2020.1737473 Lovett, F., & Pettit, P. (2009). Neorepublicanism: A normative and institutional research program. Annual Review of Political Science, 12(1), 11–29. Ministry of Home Affairs Government of India. (2013). Report of the task force: A review of the disaster management act, 2005. Government of India. Pettit, P. (1997). Republicanism: A theory of freedom and government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, P. (2013). The intergenerational storm: Dilemma or domination. Philosophy and Public Issues, 3(1), 207–244. Taylor, C. (1979). What's wrong with negative liberty. In A. Ryan (Ed.), The idea of freedom. Oxford University Press, reprinted in Miller 1991. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. (2020). Towards a post-covid India 25 governance challenges and legal reforms. Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy.

3 Discourses Around Telework in the Brazilian Banking Sector: The Impact of COVID-19 in Shifting Framings of Vulnerability and Risk Fernanda Sousa-Duarte

Introduction Diseases are known to have micro- and macro-level impacts, and in a globalised world, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) can rapidly increase not only in incidence but also in geographical range (Morse, 1999). Containing epidemics or pandemics depends on cooperation between nations as “the action or inaction of a sovereign state regarding the management of EIDs can jeopardise the health of other nations” (Salehi & Ali, 2006, p. 379). In the case of COVID-19, containment measures have varied across time and space. The pandemic has revealed local regulatory mechanisms of the governance of risk and uncertainty and also a pervasive mistrust in state-driven solutions—for example, lockdowns or quarantines—especially amongst countries that have a colonial and more

F. Sousa-Duarte (*) Laboratory of Psychodynamics and Clinic of Work, Department of Social, Work and Organisational Psychology, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 P. R. Brown, J. O. Zinn (eds.), Covid-19 and the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty, Critical Studies in Risk and Uncertainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95167-2_3

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recent authoritarian past. It is argued that such state control can evoke “memories of repressive state practices” (Leach, 2020, p. 1). When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11 amid uncertainties about the disease and its development, there were concerns about the disease’s rapid spread and severity as well as the “alarming levels of inaction” in many countries (Cucinotta & Vanelli, 2020, p. 57). As uncertainties about the disease defied pharmacological measures to control the pandemic, public health measures focused on social distancing—for example, isolation, quarantine, lockdowns—were adopted to varying degrees in different countries (Aquino et al., 2020). In Brazil, after the WHO announcement, state responses started to take place unevenly throughout its 27 federative units, as each one of these units has the autonomy to define public health policies in certain ways. As of August 22, 2020, the country was ranked the second highest in absolute numbers of cases and deaths worldwide. On a federal level, medical populism characterised the politicisation of the pandemic in Brazil (Lasco, 2020)—amidst denial, the spread of misinformation and tensions between federal and regional responses (Aquino et al., 2020; Ortega & Orsini, 2020b). Based on discourses around the threats of widespread social isolation to the country’s economy that “pitted the economy against public health” (Lasco, 2020, p. 1420), the reluctance to adopt more restrictive measures of isolation was explicit within policy-making by federal institutions. In late March, the federal government started a campaign to stimulate citizens to carry on with “normal living” called “#OBrasilNãoPodeParar” (#BrazilCannotStop), but shortly after the Parliament stopped the campaign (Vital, 2020). However, amidst these controversies, the Federal Government of Brazil instituted a Provisory Act, defining alternative labour regulations to confront the calamity that resulted from the international public emergency (Aquino et al., 2020). The Provisory Act n° 927 allowed the adoption of teleworking as one of the measures “to confront the economic effects of the public calamity state and to preserve employment and income” (Brasil, 2020, p. 1). It also accelerated existing developments towards the digitalisation of work in the country, awakening latent discussions about telework in Brazil that were ignited by the Labour Reform Law (Brasil, 2017). The 2017 law established, in an unprecedented manner, the juridical bases for

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teleworking in the country and engaged confederations of companies and trade unions across diverse production sectors in two opposing social grammars. Companies’ representatives appealed to the social grammar of modernisation, stating the reform as the only way to change labour regulations, while trade unions invoked a reactive grammar of citizenship, with critiques regarding precarisation, outsourcing and flexibilisation (Bevilaqua, 2020). Focusing on work organisation and changing conditions amid the rise of the Corona pandemic in Brazil, I aimed to investigate shifts in framings of risk and vulnerability related to telework amidst COVID-19 risk. This empirically oriented chapter focuses on institutional discourses around telework, analysed through a sociocultural approach to risk. In this study, based on the common ground between a broader international definition (International Labour Organisation, 2020) and the legal definition in Brazil (Brasil, 2017), telework refers to work that is undertaken outside of the default workplace using information and communications technology through personal electronic devices. In particular I examine the case of the Brazilian banking sector, where there has been investment in technology and digitalisation of bank work since before the pandemic (FEBRABAN, 2014). Meanwhile, bank workers’ trade unions have been critically discussing the impacts of the insertion of new technologies on workers’ health and safety since the 1980s (Seligmann-Silva, 1988).

 OVID-19 and Work in Brazil: (Re)organising C Work, Risks and Vulnerabilities Evaluating the efficacy of the social distancing and related public health containment measures is challenging due to the adoption of multiple initiatives concomitantly, as many countries reluctantly incorporated more restrictive social distancing measures (Aquino et. al, 2020). Policy-­ makers had different reasons to resist and to later adhere to social distancing measures. Amidst denial and the spread of misinformation, Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil since January 2019, was classified as the

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“leader of the ‘coronavirus-denial movement’” (Ricard & Medeiros, 2020, p. 1), with a particular approach to politicising the pandemic (Ortega & Orsini, 2020a). The Brazilian government, based on a known “anti-communist rhetoric” (p. 3), gave little importance to the disease and referred to the coronavirus as “a Chinese virus” (p. 1) that was very unlikely to spread worldwide (Andrade et al., 2020). Nevertheless, on February 4, before Brazil identified any cases on its territory, the federal government declared a state of emergency (Aquino et al., 2020) and mobilised the military to “rescue” Brazilian citizens in China. After the “rescues” and even after the first registered case of COVID-19 in São Paulo, Brazil, on February 25— which was also the first case in Latin America—the federal government did not take any further large-scale actions. The entry and initial spread of the disease in Brazil were related to rich Brazilians returning from international trips, mainly from Italy (Farias, 2020). However, in a context of social and economic inequalities (Pires et al., 2020; Fortunato et al., 2020), the numbers of cases and deaths have since differed starkly according to social and economic groups (Santos et al., 2020). As of May 2020, black Brazilians had a proportion of deaths, on average, 37% higher than whites in the same schooling range, and illiterate blacks died four times more than whites that completed higher education (Núcleo de Operações e Inteligência em Saúde, 2020). In the absence of a concerted federal response, the first state-level control measures started on February 28, determining quarantines for suspected cases and mandatory self-isolation for individuals with symptoms of the disease (Aquino et al., 2020). Between March 11, when the WHO announced the COVID-19 pandemic, and March 16, when the first death from COVID-19 in Brazil occurred, states started to adopt and amplify control measures related to events, education and the circulation of people. However, on a federal level, the efficacy of social distancing was disregarded, and the president publicly opposed municipalities’ and states’ policies, increasing a political instability characterised by intense polarisation amidst a public health crisis. On the day after the first death, the federal government suggested a social distancing measure: remote working for vulnerable civil servants in at-risk groups (Brasil, 2020). A few days later, Provisory Act 927 (MP

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927) facilitated the adoption of telework for employers in the private sector as a means to “preserve jobs”. While the International Labour Organization (ILO) pointed to telework as a means for workers to avoid contracting the disease (ILO, 2020) and included COVID-19 as a new occupational disease (Kalantary & Khadem, 2020), the Brazilian Act emphasised the economic goal of work-related federal-level measures related to COVID-19. It also denied the possibility of recognising relations between the disease and work (Brasil, 2020). Previously, in 2017, an extensive reform (Reforma Trabalhista) of the labour regulations (Brasil, 1943) regulated telework—also based on economic arguments. Unions, international organisations such as ILO and even the Brazilian Ministry of Work and Employment criticised the reform for the many organisational and labour uncertainties it raised. The future of work and workers in Brazil seemed to be at stake as new work organisations and conditions emerged. Present before COVID-19, the acceleration of the digitalisation of work that resulted from ways to tackle the disease intensified these doubts (Santos, Pereira, & Diniz, 2020; Souza, 2020; Duarte et al., 2020; Gaulejac & Massa, 2020). Activities other than healthcare—such as grocery store work, public or private transport, delivery (Watterson, 2020)—have also been seen to be potential sources of exposure and spread of the virus (Jackson Filho et al., 2020; Huynh et al., 2020). In Brazil, where around 30% of the adult population—approximately 45 million people—has no bank accounts (Época, 2019) and part of the population still relies on face-to-face banking services, Brazilian banks opted for adopting telework as a protective measure for its clients and workers. Starting with at-risk workers, telework expanded, and by July, about 300,000—out of an estimated 500,000—bank workers were working from home without provisions of going back to work at their default workplace (FEBRABAN, 2020a). Since 2012, Brazilian banks have invested R$ 116.6 billion in new technologies. It has become the second-largest segment of Information Technology in the country (Costa, 2018). Historically, the banking sector has pioneered productive restructurings that introduced new technologies in the 1980s, and those are linked to decrease in jobs, an increase of workload and a wave of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (Santos,

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2018). On the other hand, following this movement, bank workers’ unions pioneered discussions about workers’ health and illness in Brazil (Seligmann-Silva, 1988). With differing discourses around work, encompassing public, private and mixed-economy institutions all over Brazil, I chose this sector to understand shifts in framings of risk and vulnerability related to telework before and after the COVID-19 outbreak.

 elework and COVID-19: Risk Objects or T Objects at Risk? The COVID-19 outbreak has enhanced discussions about telework, but no consensus over what telework is has been reached. According to the ILO, “countries are using slightly different and sometimes overlapping definitions [of telework], and different terms are being used interchangeably [remote work, teleworking, working at home and home-based work]” (International Labour Organisation, 2020, p. 1). For the ILO, it is a matter of “lack of statistical standards”. In Brazil, “home office” and “telework” have been mostly used interchangeably (Silva & Figueira, 2017), especially since the first regulations in 2011 (Brasil, 2011) and after the Labour Reform (Brasil, 2017). Although there is still an on-­going debate around defining telework and its impacts for organisations, and workers are still not delineated, there are two typical components that define telework in different countries: the place of work, and the use of information and communications technology (ILO, 2020). Another consensus is that telework is a current trend in the labour market. Apart from these two features, there is also no consensus in the academic literature on telework in Brazil, but authors have identified three trends to understand telework: an optimistic perspective, focusing on the benefits of telework; a pessimistic outlook of telework which is mostly concerned with issues of workers’ health and safety, considering the flexibility of work conditions as a new form of exploitation; and critical readings of telework that mediate these two other positions. The first trend encompasses publications within Business Management Studies and is

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organisation oriented, while the second trend is usually related to Sociology and is more worker oriented (Rocha & Amador, 2018). After COVID-19, when telework became a measure to mitigate health and economic uncertainties related to the pandemics in the country, the literature on telework in Brazil turned to discussions about indefiniteness in the labour regulations regarding telework and their impacts for workers (Santos, Miranda, & Monti Junior, 2020; Belmonte, 2020; Sturmer & Fincato, 2020; Zylberstajn, 2020; Santos, Pereira, & Diniz, 2020; Campos, 2020). As seen above, framings of risk and vulnerability related to telework in Brazil are continually shifting for—and between—different actors. Under a relational understanding of risk, risk is a social construct that is culturally bound. It encompasses an often variable, continually evaluated relationship of risk between objects that, depending on the observer, can be identified as either a risk object or an object at risk (Corvellec, 2010). Such identities depend on the value, in terms of worth, attributed to objects. It implies that an object, as telework, for example, cannot be intrinsically risky or at risk. The notion of the object here refers to—as well as in Ahmed (2004), who draws inspiration from a Freudian notion of the object (Coelho Jr., 2001)—“any kind of physical, cultural, or social artefact that can be delineated and singled out. It can be a natural phenomenon, such as lightning, or a manufactured product such as a gun. But it can also be a cultural representation such as a nationalist ideology, or a social behaviour such as drinking alcohol” (Boholm & Corvellec, 2011, p. 171). In the light of COVID-19, “where practices relating to an object have ritual like qualities, being seen by some as a ‘risk object’ (risky), and yet by others as an ‘object at risk’ (something valuable and under threat)” (Brown, 2020, p. 9), I seek to understand the shifting framings of risk and vulnerability in the discourses of banks and unions around telework in the Brazilian labour market before and after COVID-19. Therefore, I adopt a sociocultural approach to risk (Douglas, 1992, 2007; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982; Ahmed, 2004; Boholm & Corvellec, 2011; Lupton, 2013; Brown, 2020). In doing so, I consider that risk and vulnerability are intertwined and continually being “reframed and redefined” by various groups concomitantly according to what is at stake in order to govern and manage emerging risk relationships (Boholm & Corvellec, 2011, p. 182).

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F. Sousa-Duarte

Methodological and Analytical Approaches The Brazilian banking system is complex and encompasses public, private and mixed-economy institutions of different sizes. FEBRABAN— Brazilian Federation of Banks—represents 119 out of 164 banking institutions in Brazil. Together, “they hold 95% of the total assets in the system”, and the federation attributes its “role as a spokesman” for banks in Brazil to it (FEBRABAN, 2020b). CONTRAF-CUT— National Confederation of Financial Sector Workers, Unified Central of Workers—is the largest trade union organisation representing 500,000 bank workers in Brazil in 8 regional federations and 158 unions. I chose these institutions for their representativity of the Brazilian banking sector, as they are the signatories1 of any collective labour agreements or conventions (Brasil, 1943) for banks and bank workers in the country. News and reports were collected from the websites of bank and workers’ institutions: the five major banks in Brazil (Itaú, Banco do Brasil, Caixa Econômica Federal, Bradesco and Santander), FEBRABAN (Brazilian Federation of Banks) and CONTRAF-CUT (National Confederation of the Financial Sector’s Workers—United Central of Workers). As all documents included in this study were accessible to the public, I consider there are no ethical issues on disclosing the names of the institutions. By using the available search tools in their websites, I used the keywords “teletrabalho” (telework), “trabalho remoto” (remote work) and “home office” to perform 3 independent searches for each of the 7 websites, which resulted in 21 data sub-sets. These keywords were chosen according to the literature on telework and Brazilian government regulations on telework and also by examining the emerging data broadly. I included all search results (n = 155) that contained these keywords, excluding repeated ones or the ones that were not about telework in 1  FEBRABAN participates in the collective agreements through FENABAN (National Federation of Banks), its employers’ organisation.

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banks or Brazil (n = 66). I did not specify the time of publication. I organised the data according to keywords, date (years or before/after COVID-19) and source, grouping FEBRABAN and the five banks together. I then performed a retrospective document analysis quantitatively and qualitatively (Gil, 1999). This methodological choice allowed me to analytically treat previously untreated materials in the light of my research proposal. For the descriptive and inferential statistical analysis, I used SPSS, v. 26. I investigated the association between the type of institution and choice of the keyword to refer to telework through Chi-square tests. I considered the analysis statistically significant if p