Reproduced with permission from Transforming Society
Fear has played a significant role in our experience of the pandemic. So often ignored and downplayed, how should we be engaging with this emotion and thinking about it in the context of policy and politics?
In this episode of the Transforming Society podcast, Jess Miles speaks with Matt Flinders, co-editor of the latest themed issue of Global Discourse, about the role of fear in politics and public policy.
Leland Harper (Lharper3@sienaheights.edu), Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Siena Heights University
Much of the data collection on COVID-19 infection and its long-term consequences among particular race groups, thus far, has been privately funded and limited in scope. Few governmental agencies have funded, analysed or appealed in meaningful ways to race-based data related to any aspects of this pandemic.
Effective policy relies on the most complete and accurate data available, especially regarding health, freedom and finance. Without complete data, policy makers’ work is compromised, and the resulting policy will likely be misguided and ineffective. The unique positioning of Blacks within American society, and the associated fears within Black America, requires that race-based COVID-19 data be collected and considered by public officials when drafting policy. Insofar as Black Americans are more susceptible to more profound, generational, defining loss than white Americans, race-based data is an essential tool for drafting and implementing effective policies related to lockdowns, economic recovery and vaccine distribution. Publicly funded race-based data collection and analysis, in this case, is the best available tool for policy makers to gain insight into a particular segment of the population and to ultimately draft policies that better respond to the specific needs of that community. Race-based data is a tool that needs to be used far more broadly than it has been up to this point in the pandemic.
Continue readingMatthew Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Politics, Lancaster University (m.johnson@lancaster.ac.uk), Matthew Flinders, Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield (m.flinders@sheffield.ac.uk) and Dan Degerman, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Bristol (dan.degerman@bristol.ac.uk)
This Editor’s Choice features contributions examining the (mis-)management of the pandemic. A year ago, we (Flinders, Degerman and Johnson) came together out of shared concern for the place of emotions in politics and shared belief that many orthodoxies on fear as an instrument of public administration were just wrong. As the pandemic worked its way through communities and countries across the globe, it became increasingly clear that long-standing rejections of fear as a negative or pre-political emotion failed to grasp not just its adaptive evolutionary value, but the vital role it can play in enabling societies to deal with crises. We set out the ways in which key frames of analysis had been rendered inadequate by the pandemic. Our conclusion was that, as a consequence, there was space for new scholarship on the politics of fear. This issue is the most substantive iteration of that work.
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Laura Forlano is Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design (ID) and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab (lforlano@id.iit.edu)
This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article Laura Forlano: Foreword
We cannot rationalize our way out of a crisis – or, to be more exact, the multiple crises that we face. We cannot audit our way towards a better future. We cannot merely criticize the failures of the past or those of the moment. We must have an artist’s vision, we must cultivate an activist’s ability to reimagine and we must create a collective dream that allows us to enact and experience alternatives to the current conditions. In short, we must embrace a speculative praxis.
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Kaya Barry is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social Cultural Research (k.barry@griffith.edu.au), Michelle Duffy is Associate Professor in the School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle (michelle.duffy@newcastle.edu.au), Michele Lobo is Lecturer in Human Geography, Deakin University (michele.lobo@deakin.edu.au)
This blog post relates to the Global Discourse article Kaya Barry, Michelle Duffy & Michele Lobo: Speculative listening: Melting sea ice, and new methods of listening with the planet
Saltwater incursions, mangrove loss, species decline, ocean acidification and declining sea ice are expressions of global environmental change that are incredibly hard for the average person to fathom. Such slow emergencies are closely monitored by a complexity of scientific measures, yet the general public can often find this hard to digest and understand. Even as authoritative reports and global agreements – such as the 2019 IPBES Global Assessment or the Paris Agreement – emphasise the need for shared responsibility for planetary futures, these ‘big’ questions of how to act can lead to paralysis and paradoxically strengthen narratives of climate denialism and scepticism. When seeking to understand things that exceed our human grasp in the diverse planetary worlds we inhabit, the philosopher Bruno Latour urges us to learn ‘how to get our bearings, how to orient ourselves’. Speculative listening with the planet opens up possibilities for thinking and acting otherwise.
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