'Normal was a problem' - post-pandemic futures

Luke Goode

Chapter 12 in A Research Agenda for COVID-19 and Society, 2022, pp 195-214 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter considers how we have been thinking and talking about possible futures beyond COVID-19 while still in the midst of the pandemic. It highlights two dominant frames: a focus on how to re-establish a pre-crisis "normality" on the one hand and, on the other, a reading of the pandemic as both an impetus and opportunity to "build back better". As general orientations, both frames are politically and ideologically ambiguous and this has implications for the range of possible futures that may be built in the pandemic's wake. These rhetorically appealing frames can be exploited by powerful interests, but they also open terrain for potential contestation. The chapter sketches out some basic contours of a research agenda centred on futures discourse in the time of COVID-19. In doing so, it emphasises that what is not said about the future is at least as important as what is said about it.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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