Covid-19 Pandemic: An Unprecedented Individual and Collective experience on a Global Scale

What we have experienced with the Covid-19 pandemic is totally unprecedented on this scale. The physical and social distancing linked to sanitary restrictions, confinements, and barrier gestures has changed family, friends, love, social, and professional lives of the populations. Geographical mobility and freedom of movement have been impeded. Depending on the culture and the country, the degree of acceptability of sanitary measures has varied. How has this major crisis been experienced by individuals? What did it change in their daily behavior, in their way of living and in their society? How did people accept the new health standards imposed by governments? What traces will remain in individual and collective lives?

In this course we will study the changes associated with the pandemic and we will try to measure the traces on social life but also on the relationship between citizens and governments. Learning, working, being cared for and dying, loving and meeting are all situations where the pandemic has brought about profound changes in our most usual ways of being and doing. The aim is to identify and list these changes.

In order to carry out this reflection, the course will rely on the work produced by researchers in the human and social sciences, but also on the publications of journalists and the numerous surveys that have been carried out among the population, not forgetting literature and fine arts. The media treatment of the pandemic on a planetary scale as well as the role played by social networks will also be a focus of the course. Finally, although focused on France, the course will also have a comparative dimension by taking into account the way in which the health crisis was treated and experienced in different countries, particularly within the French-speaking world.

Required text:
Anne Muxel, L'Autre à distance. Quand une pandémie touche à l'intime, Odile Jacob, 2021 ; ISBN: 9782738157621