Between resilience and recidivism: the social mutations of COVID-19

Abstract

The article presents the main results of the study entitled The Social Mutations of COVID-19. A Multidisciplinary Perspective undertaken by the Philosophy and Social Sciences Section (SFCS) of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC) in 2021 and 2022, in which a team representing some of the different disciplines encompassed within the SFCS—demographics, law, economics, communication studies, educational policy, geography, anthropology, border history, educational psychology and sociology—assessed the impact of the pandemic on the Catalan-speaking territories. The throughline of the analysis was to interpret the impact of the pandemic as a crisis of governability, in which the response of the different social science disciplines should be viewed as yet another way to struggle on behalf of and preserve individual and group life. Once resilience was confirmed, with epidemiological and pharmaceutical research coupled with the healthcare sector playing a crucial role, there is now discussion of a conjunctural effect; however, more than going back to normal we are finding an accelerated recurrence of the most negative trends identified prior to the pandemic, which could mean a fracture of the system on a longer timescale.