Outbreak Diaries


Book Description

March 2020 When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Canada, Vancouver-based comic artist Jason Turner recognized that both his community and the world were undergoing major changes that needed to be documented. Outbreak Diaries is an autobiographical diary-style comic that covers the complexities of working, maintaining relationships, and staying sane during an exceptionally difficult period of time.




Pandemic Diaries


Book Description

The present residing situation has forced each being to change it's regular monotonous routine towards life. It has spectacularly erased irrespective of cast and creed or religion. This book is just the penned down outbrought version of a few very abled writers, who brought out their daily journals, thoughts they faced and some deep held melancholic incidents. A book would be an understatement to what these young minds have women together after they grabbed the chance thrown their way by life to cross paths with their very own mindtype people. By supporting one another we now want to express and also relate to many other hidden writers out there, who might find it hard to come out.... A small message from our writers: "You are not alone, we are there for you. "




Pandemic Diaries


Book Description

When Covid-19 swept the world, governments scrambled to protect their citizens and chart a course back to normality. As Health Secretary, Matt Hancock was at the forefront of Britain's battle against the virus, trying to steer the country through the crisis in a world where information was scarce, judgements huge and the roadmap non-existent. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-seen material, including official records, his notes at the time and communications with all the key players in Britain's Covid-19 story, this candid account reveals the inner workings of government during a time of national crisis, reflecting on both the successes and the failures. Recounting the most important decisions in the race to develop a vaccine in record time and to build a nationwide testing capacity from the ground up, Pandemic Diaries provides the definitive account of Britain's battle to turn the tide against Covid-19. Crucially, it also offers an honest assessment of the lessons we need to learn to be prepared for next time – because there will be a next time.




Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary


Book Description

During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets. This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls. This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.




The Wuhan Lockdown


Book Description

A metropolis with a population of about 11 million, Wuhan sits at the crossroads of China. It was here that in the last days of 2019, the first reports of a mysterious new form of pneumonia emerged. Before long, an abrupt and unprecedented lockdown was declared—the first of many such responses to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. This book tells the dramatic story of the Wuhan lockdown in the voices of the city’s own people. Using a vast archive of more than 6,000 diaries, the sociologist Guobin Yang vividly depicts how the city coped during the crisis. He analyzes how the state managed—or mismanaged—the lockdown and explores how Wuhan’s residents responded by taking on increasingly active roles. Yang demonstrates that citizen engagement—whether public action or the civic inaction of staying at home—was essential in the effort to fight the pandemic. The book features compelling stories of citizens and civic groups in their struggle against COVID-19: physicians, patients, volunteers, government officials, feminist organizers, social media commentators, and even aunties loudly swearing at party officials. These snapshots from the lockdown capture China at a critical moment, revealing the intricacies of politics, citizenship, morality, community, and digital technology. Presenting the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people, The Wuhan Lockdown is an unparalleled account of the first moments of the crisis that would define the age.




Epidemic


Book Description

A global health catastrophe narrowly averted. A world unprepared for another outbreak. In December 2013, a young boy in a tiny West African village contracted the deadly Ebola virus. The virus spread to his relatives, then to neighboring communities, then across international borders. The world's first urban Ebola outbreak quickly overwhelmed the global health system and threatened to kill millions. As we are currently seeing, in an increasingly interconnected world in which everyone is one or two flights away from New York or London or Beijing, a localized epidemic has become a pandemic. Ebola's spread through West Africa to Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the United States sounded global alarms that the next killer outbreak is right around the corner—and that the world is woefully unprepared to combat a new deadly disease. From the poorest villages of rural West Africa to the Oval Office itself, this book tells the story of a deadly virus that spun wildly out of control—and reveals the truth about how close the world came to a catastrophic global pandemic. It is a story that serves as a cautionary tale for the COVID-19 epidemic currently spreading throughout the world.




Creative Resilience and COVID-19


Book Description

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.




Reimagining Communication in a Post-pandemic World: The Intersection of Information, Media Technology, and Psychology


Book Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed social interactions. Social distancing policies, lockdowns, and mandatory quarantines have accelerated the technological mediation of communication (e.g. AI-mediated communication, computer-mediated communication) on an unprecedented scale, willingly or otherwise. Many physical activities such as office work, education, and conferences have had to be performed in the online space through social media apps, the metaverse or specialized programs on mobile phones or laptops as part of pandemic control efforts. As a result, digitally mediated channels have become critical for information acquisition and communication across a wide spectrum of human activities such as education, social interaction, entertainment, and commercial activities. Human beings are increasingly reliant on non-human agents, including social media, Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered tools, or smartphone mobile devices for most routine activities, professional communication, and social interactions. As scientific understanding of COVID-19 improves, pandemic restrictions are gradually loosening. However, it remains to be seen whether the pandemic communication paradigm characterized by heavy technological mediation and reliance on non-human agents will also gradually decline, or will the paradigm shift become deeply entrenched with further acceleration of dependency on technological mediation and non-human agents.




Chronicling a Crisis


Book Description

Chronicling a Crisis is a powerful primary source collection compiled during the peak of the COVID pandemic between spring 2020 and spring 2021. This upstate New York college was the only school in the state that had to send home all its students twice due to COVID, which attracted international media attention. This book was inspired by the UK’s Mass Observation Project from the 1930s, which drew on the war-time diaries of ordinary British citizens to track the impact of World War II on their lives. With over two hundred blog entries from students, faculty, and staff—including diary reflections, poems, pictures, and thought pieces—this volume lays bare the grief, frustration, fear, resilience, and upheavals of this tumultuous period. This book will be of interest for students of New York history, American history and the digital humanities as well as general readers interested in understanding the impact of the COVID pandemic on universities and their students.