Already dealing with disruptive market forces, the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs) faced fundamental challenges resulting from the global health crisis, wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. With catastrophic changes to cultural consumption, cultural organizations are dealing with short-, medium-, and long-term threats to livelihoods under lockdown. This book aims at filling the literature gap about the consequences of one of the hardest crises – COVID-19 – severely impacting all the fields of the CCIs. With a focus on European countries and taking into account the evolving and unstable context caused by the pandemic still in progress, this book investigates the first reactions and actual strategies of CCIs’ actors, government bodies, and cultural institutions facing the COVID-19 crisis and the potential consequences of these emergency strategies for the future of the CCIs. Solutions adopted during the repeated lockdowns by CCIs’ actors could originate new forms of cultural consumption and/or new innovative market strategies. This book brings together a constellation of contributors to analyze the cultural sector as it seeks to emerge from this existential challenge. The global perspectives presented in this book provide research-based evidence to understand and reflect on an unprecedented period, allowing reflective practitioners to learn and develop from a range of real-world cases. The book will also be of interest to researchers, academics, and students with a particular interest in the management of cultural and creative organizations and crisis management.

This book addresses the twin goals of “Build Back Better” than before the pandemic and the Great Reset called for by the World Economic Forum. Can we use this crisis to re-vision capitalism as a life-preserving, livelihood-enriching phenomenon? All businesses now face the challenge of prospering while serving and saving lives. This should have been their mission all along! The pandemic is killing disproportionately those whom we have neglected. Deaths in Europe and the Americas are between ten and one hundred times more frequent than deaths in China and the region influenced by Chinese civilization for two thousand years. This is all despite the weeks of warning we had and wasted. Since Western governments must massively stimulate their economies in any case, spending trillions, this is a priceless opportunity to usher in certain kinds of world-saving businesses, and show out those kinds of business that wreck our eco-system. We have a priceless opportunity to create an economy that serves all its stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers and those who physically create wealth, not just those who trade in shares. This virus has sniffed out our selfishness, our toxic levels of individualism and self-indulgence. We should never waste a crisis on recriminations. It is an opportunity to reset our moral compass to re-discover that the true mission of business enterprise is to serve humanity with higher goals. Leadership must be dedicated to service, not self-aggrandizement.

This book studies the evolution in human thought, action, and behavior as a result of the 2008 fi nancial crisis and the Covid-19 crisis. Through the presentation and analysis of data, as recorded for at least a decade, and using the Greek economy as a case study, the authors examine the changes in social and human capital, increasingly risk-averse behavior, and changes in people’s general psyche and economic action in Greek society and economy.

This book centers on negotiations around cultural, governmental, and individual constructions of COVID-19. It considers how the coronavirus pandemic has been negotiated in different cultures and countries, with the final part of the volume focusing on South Asia and Pakistan in particular. The chapters include auto-ethnographic accounts and ethnographic explorations that reflect upon experiences of living with the pandemic and the implications for all areas of life. The book explicates people's dealings with COVID-19 at various levels, situates the spread of rumors, conspiracy theories, and new social rituals within micro- and/or macro-contexts, and describes the interplay between the virus and various institutionalized forms of inequalities and structural vulnerabilities. Bringing together a variety of perspectives, the volume relates to the past, describes the Covidian present, and offers futuristic implications. It enlists distinct imaginaries based on current understandings of an extraordinary challenge that holds significant importance for our human future.

Since its emergence in early 2020, the COVID-19 crisis has affected every part of the world. Well beyond its health effects, the pandemic has wrought major changes in people’s everyday lives as they confront restrictions imposed by physical distancing and consequences such as loss of work, working or learning from home and reduced contact with family and friends. This edited collection covers a diverse range of experiences, practices and representations across international contexts and cultures (UK, Europe, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand). Together, these contributions offer a rich account of COVID society. They provide snapshots of what life was like for people in a variety of situations and locations living through the first months of the novel coronavirus crisis, including discussion not only of health-related experiences but also the impact on family, work, social life and leisure activities. The socio-material dimensions of quotidian practices are highlighted: death rituals, dating apps, online musical performances, fitness and exercise practices, the role of windows, healthcare work, parenting children learning at home, moving in public space as a blind person and many more diverse topics are explored. In doing so, the authors surface the feelings of strangeness and challenges to norms of practice that were part of many people’s experiences, highlighting the profound affective responses that accompanied the disruption to usual cultural forms of sociality and ritual in the wake of the COVID outbreak and restrictions on movement. The authors show how social relationships and social institutions were suspended, re-invented or transformed while social differences were brought to the fore. At the macro level, the book includes localised and comparative analyses of political, health system and policy responses to the pandemic, and highlights the differences in representations and experiences of very different social groups, including people with disabilities, LGBTQI people, Dutch Muslim parents, healthcare workers in France and Australia, young adults living in northern Italy, performing artists and their audiences, exercisers in Australia and New Zealand, the Latin cultures of Spain and Italy, Asian-Americans and older people in Australia. This volume will appeal to undergraduates and postgraduates in sociology, cultural and media studies, medical humanities, anthropology, political science and cultural geography.

This book explores the impact of Covid-19, and the associated state lockdown, on rural lives in a former homeland in South Africa. The 2020 Disaster Management Act saw the state sweep through rural areas, targeting funerals and other customary practices as potential ‘super-spreader’ events. This unprecedented clampdown produced widespread disruption, fear and anxiety. The authors build on path-breaking work concerning local responses to West Africa’s Ebola epidemic, and examine the HIV/AIDS pandemic, to understand the impact of the Covid crisis on these communities, and on rural Africa more broadly. To shed light on the role of custom and ritual in rural social change during the pandemic, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa applies long-term historical and ethnographic research; theories of people’s science, local knowledge and the human economy; and fieldwork conducted in ten rural South African communities during lockdown. The volume highlights differences between developments in Southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent, while exploring how the former apartheid homelands–commonly, yet problematically, represented as former ‘labour reserves’–have since been reconstituted as new home-spaces. In short, it explains why rural people have been so angered by the state’s assault on their cultural practices and institutions in the time of Covid.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal). At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an act of biowarfare. And a rogue experimenter in man-made diseases is preparing his own terrifying solution. As already-fraying global relations begin to snap, the virus slashes across the United States, dismantling institutions and decimating the population. With his own wife and children facing diminishing odds of survival, Henry travels from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia to his home base at the CDC in Atlanta, searching for a cure and for the origins of this seemingly unknowable disease. The End of October is a one-of-a-kind thriller steeped in real-life political and scientific implications, filled with the insight that has been the hallmark of Wright’s acclaimed nonfiction and the full-tilt narrative suspense that only the best fiction can offer.