Coronavirus, Crisis and Culture

Protests, Policing and Mediation during the 2020 Pandemic

Ben Harbisher, Stuart Price

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2023
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538161104
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume represents a timely and essential contribution for both scholars and readers of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Whereas the bulk of literary, academic, and investigative coverage of the Pandemic has focussed on factors such as i) maintaining social cohesion, ii) developing a vaccine, iii) fighting fake news, this submission explores the erosion of civil liberties and human rights during the pandemic, the increase of policing and supervisory practices, and the innovative ways in which contemporary social movements have expressed their concerns at the measures governments have put in place.

The volume challenges restrictions placed on freedom of speech, in which contrary opinions to mainstream public discourse have been branded as fake news, disinformation, or conspiratorial. It questions the legitimacy of authoritative voices such as the BBC with regards to the regurgitation of political dogma and the profound lack of investigative reportage therein. The volume examines how new or conventional social movements have responded to the pandemic and how fundamental human and civil rights such as those campaigned for by Black Lives Matter has united people from different backgrounds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contents
• Chapter 8: Public Policy, Protest and COVID-19
• Chapter 1: The Free Press under Attack: Police Attacks on the Media at the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Chapter 2: The Bureaucratisation of Civil Disobedience: What Looks Like Order and What Looks Like Anarchy?
• Chapter 3: Grassroots Mobilisation against the Politics of Hate: The Case of Sardine in Italy
• Chapter 4: Reigniting a Violent Protest Wave: How the Backlash to the Black Lives Matter Movement and COVID-19 Restrictions Accelerated Radicalisation in a Far-Right Extremist/Antifascist Protest Wave in Portland, Oregon
• Chapter 5: The Death of a Movement?: COVID-19 and the Anti-CAA Protests in India
• Chapter 6: When Urban Spaces Sleep, Virtual Activities and Protests Emerge through Social Media: The Cultural Sector in Spain during the COVID-19 Mandatory Lockdown
• Chapter 7: Rage against Restrictions on Freedom: The Use of Social Media as Protest Tools by the Spanish Radical Right in the COVID-19 Era
• Chapter 8: Public Policy, Protest and COVID-19
• Chapter 9: Insurrection! The Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021: Temporal Development, Political Hyperbole and the Democracy/State Conflation
• Chapter 10: Distress, Dissent, Control: Some Responses to COVID-19 Lockdown Measures in Sydney, Australia, 2021
• Chapter 11: Are Hate Speech and Fake News Contributing to Police Brutality in Nigeria?: A Study of the #End-SARS Protest
• Chapter 12: Constable Dixon and the Lockdown of Dock Green
• About the Contributors