A socio-spatial research agenda on the COVID-19 pandemic

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As the scientific community urgently seeks to understand the uneven geographical patterns of transmission and mortality rates of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become necessary to challenge the tacit assumption that the pandemic is strictly a public health issue that is primarily reserved for the technocratic expertise of health professionals and officials. These discrepancies in outcome imply that the pandemic yields spatial selectivities (Jessop et al., 2008), which have been revealed through the uneven manifestation of societal impacts between places, localities, communities, and neighbourhoods. For this reason, the pandemic and the management thereof must be deemed as social issues that require the input of sociological theory, insofar as its spread is not only spatially embedded but also socially mediated. To foreground a socio-spatial perspective of the pandemic, I propose that we must start with two analytical premises on socio-spatiality.

Original languageEnglish
JournalActa Sociologica (United Kingdom)
Volume63
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)453-456
Number of pages4
ISSN0001-6993
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2020

    Research areas

  • Covid-19, human geography, marginality, selectivities, socio-spatial relations, spatial

ID: 254519992