The health crisis resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic has irreversibly modified, and is still modifying, social, economic and cultural relations on a global scale, making this crisis an unprecedented event in the recent history of humanity. Covid-19 has clearly exposed social inequalities, which in Ibero-America have a particular character due to its socio-economic structure: the vast number of irregular jobs, the difficulties of accessing healthcare, the densification of urban spaces, etc. Although contagious and infectious diseases are undeniably a long-standing issue, the coronavirus epidemic has placed the world in an unprecedented health crisis, intensified by the characteristics of our societies, which are connected both geographically and in terms of communication.
Some of the consequences of this crisis are still unforeseeable, and to date have affected different social aspects such as tourism, education, cultural practices, working patterns, etc. Expert, political, and lay actors publicly discuss the causes, developments and consequences of the epidemic, generating discourses on what is understood by pandemic, crisis, epidemic, etc. From the point of view of various disciplines from the human and social sciences, we want to question the social effects of the pandemic in the Ibero-American world and propose a discussion that allows us to put into perspective the antecedents, causes, synergies and consequences of this and other health crises.
The emergence and legitimisation of the modern state, and its coercive capacities, frame this reflection, which also aims to project itself into the more recent past (AIDS, syphilis, Spanish flu, etc.), not excluding the first years of the establishment of the nation-state (Motín de Esquilache), which, according to Foucault, established the biopolitical regime characteristic of contemporaneity.
We will ask ourselves, then, what are the collective responses to the readjustments in social control imposed by the pandemic and in what way are they ascribed to political contexts (in the case of the Spanish ultra-right or the mobilisation for a new constitution in Chile), economic (the ebb and flow of so-called "tourism-phobia") or cultural (the subversive potential of confined theatre or the expansion of Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime or Movistar).
In short, we propose a reflection on the socio-economic changes provoked or arising from this and other health crises, as well as the scope of cultural creation when it comes to answering, integrating, or modifying the medical-political discourse of government bodies in Latin America, Spain, and Portugal.