The consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic remain difficult to appraise. In just a few weeks, some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning our societies have been challenged. The ensuing transformations and responses to the pandemic will have structural effects that will last for decades. The IRS editorial board aims to stimulate a debate that goes beyond current headlines and to develop analyses within a pluralistic research community in social sciences.
The call is open to empirical, analytical, and theoretical papers on the economic, political, and social issues of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Contributions must address how the pandemic challenges the basic assumptions and presuppositions of social sciences:
- How social sciences explore, analyse, and interpret a pandemic scenario and its political, economic, cultural, but also individual and collective implications?
- Are social sciences engaging with a revision of the theoretical and applicative models for the analysis of social change?
- How this unexpected, rapid, and radical change affects the integration of social sciences with the formal, physical, life and applied sciences in the analysis of the pandemic?
- Which is or could be the support given by social sciences to the institutional process of decision-making at a global/local level?
Given the variety and scope of issues raised by COVID-19, this call is not limited to the above-mentioned issues. The core objective of the call is to enable the scientific community to read and write solid and structured contributions that might cast a new light on a hugely demanding debate, at this critical moment.
