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Project

Cariplo - A comparative and longitudinal study of practices and infrastructures of solidarity in times of pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges for policymakers, public health officials and societies, highlighting the need for deeper understandings of people’s views, practices and responses to the policies implemented during the crisis. How do people react to policy measures that have been introduced? How do they appropriate scientific evidence and what actions do they take on their own initiative over and above the official advice by governments? What motivates citizens to follow, adapt to, or ignore, the advice of public authorities? What, or who, do people trust in these uncertain times?

To examine these relevant questions, the SolPan consortium has been established in April 2020. The consortium is structured in different project arms each carrying out independent – yet thoroughly coordinated – research in nine different European countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

We use a longitudinal, multi-sited qualitative research design involving in-depth open-ended interviews to compare findings across countries and to identify differences and similarities in how people respond to the pandemic and the ensuing policy measures, but also the values and reference points that underpin such responses. These findings are expected to generate valuable evidence for policies for pandemic preparedness, prevention and containment in the countries under study, and beyond.

Within this broader framework, the Italian arm of the project will explore in depth people’s practices, values and motivations in response to the COVID-19 policies implemented in the Italian context. Informed by a co-productionist perspective on the mutual shaping of scientific knowledge practices, technology and societies, the Italian arm of the study will further carry out in-depth investigation of the interplay between novel technologies (e.g. digital contact-tracing), scientific evidence and expertise, on the one side, and political and policy decision-making, on the other side. It will probe how technology mediates experiences of the pandemic; how people appropriate scientific evidence in their daily practices and relate to scientific expertise; as well as how emerging social (e.g. social distancing) and technological orders (e.g. digital public health surveillance systems) mutually shape each other around claimed practices of solidarity.

Ultimately, this project is expected to provide valuable and timely contribution to emerging interdisciplinary scholarship on the relationship between societal crises, emerging technologies, scientific knowledge practices, and solidarity. It will also foster much-needed policy learning on public health emergencies preparedness, reaching out to a varied set of stakeholders including policymakers at the regional Lombardy and national Italian level.

Datum:1 sep 2021 →  Heden
Trefwoorden:sociologie, COVID-19
Disciplines:Sociologie van kennis