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An extended brief overviewing a bread swath of responses from higher educational institutions worldwide, to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This episode of EPICAST includes discussions with social scientists working with Sonar-Global on vulnerability assessments and community engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight the method of ‘vulnerability assessments’ and how they improve our understanding of vulnerability and social exclusion in the context of infectious disease threats. We also discuss work around community engagement and the importance of dialogue with people in need to identify adaptive public health models that improve lives before, during, and after, an epidemic. We include findings from Malta, Slovenia, and Denmark. This episode of EPICAST includes discussions with social scientists working with Sonar-Global on vulnerability assessments and community engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight the method of ‘vulnerability assessments’ and how they improve our understanding of vulnerability and social exclusion in the context of infectious disease threats. We also discuss work around community engagement and the importance of dialogue with people in need to identify adaptive public health models that improve lives before, during, and after, an epidemic. We include findings from Malta, Slovenia, and Denmark.

Compilations of video clips of Italian mayors berating citizens breaking quarantine to walk dogs, jog, or play ping pong have become something of a ‘viral’ sensation both in Italy and globally. The clips are often amusing, featuring politicians accusing their constituents of vanity, incontinence, and other assorted sins. As anthropologists interested in the politics of accusation , these small-scale disputes allow us to think through the sorts of political horizons that the novel coronavirus is bringing into being. As the virus spreads, we seek to track the sorts of accusations that spread with it as they provoke what we call virological witch hunts. Unlike the episodes of public blaming and shaming some political figures have promoted through national media, virological witch hunts are small-scale, bottom-up, intimate, and usually amplified through local social networks. We link them to the phenomenon of the untori in XVI- XVII century Lombardy, another bottom-up surge of accusations against those believed to be spreading disease that authorities had to deal with. Relying on social media, we have been reaching out to quarantined residents of the province of Bergamo, in the Lombardy region who have been publicly shamed for perceived transgressions in the midst of the quarantine. The responses offer insight into how the pandemic has precipitated what Massimo, one of our interlocutors, has termed a “collective, hysterical version of preexisting individual patterns of blaming and shaming”.

This is the second special issue of the Journal of Sonic Studies on the topic Sound at Home. In the original call for papers, we asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to engage with home sounds – everyday sounds such as the hum of appliances, the babble of water piping, the chatter of media or the creaking of a wooden floor; sounds that seep in from other homes and from the world outside (traffic, music, shouting, etc.); disconcerting, unfamiliar sounds of places that have become a temporary home; or sounds that go unheard in their familiarity – using a wide range of approaches and methods. The call was sent out in February 2020, just before much of public life around the globe came to a halt in response to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic. Despite these challenging circumstances, we received an unexpectedly large number of exciting submissions from a variety of perspectives and decided to split the special issue up into two: The first issue (JSS21) was published before the summer of 2021 and consists of submissions that analyze, through diverse approaches, home sounds, focusing on sonic territoriality, materiality, and the concept of home beyond the traditional family dwelling.This second issue (JSS22) consists of contributions dealing with a number of closely related topics, namely, the home in its relation to the outside world, sonic communities within or in spite of isolation, and vocal expression as part of or in defiance of this isolation. Instead of offering a brief overview of these papers in this introduction, we would like to take the opportunity here to call attention to some interesting rhythms and trends in the scholarly investigation of sounds in the home that have surfaced across both issues.

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to scarcities in government-run shops, many inhabitants of Cuba’s capital Havana turned to chat groups in order to access everyday products. Messaging applications such as Telegram and WhatsApp replaced the traditional black market in Cuba for accessing food, hygiene products, medication and other basic necessities. During the government's #quedateencasa (stay at home) campaign, some of the groups quickly garnered members in the ten thousands, and became an inescapable necessity for many Habaneros seeking to fulfil their daily needs.Digital black markets are nothing new in Cuba, despite persistent internet scarcity. Since 2007, the classifieds website Revolico has facilitated the exchange of foreign consumer products such as smartphones, computers or clothes by international brands that are imported into the country by importers (so-called mulas). The recent expansion of internet access has created new opportunities for illicit e-commerce. The rapid success of chat groups as online market spaces became possible only when the government introduced a 3G network in December 2018, enabling smartphone owners to finally be able to enjoy a reliable internet connection.Based on long-term research, Basic Necessities offers a startling documentation of societal needs in a time of crisis. The project allows us to see in what products are currently in high demand; what goods are available through state distribution channels; what are impossible to obtain and even what the current price of a kilogram of chicken meat is.