This research aims to analyze the structure and content of the social representation of the novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, paying particular attention to socially constructed meanings, in order to understand in what way the Covid-19 pandemic is going to take form in the collective consciousness The study involved 484 Italian citizens, recruited through snowball sampling Data were collected using the free association technique and the inductive term "Coronavirus", by an online questionnaire administered between April 17 and April 26, 2020 Participants were also asked to clarify the meaning of each of the three words elicited The corpus of words was analyzed by using EVOC 2005 software, adopting a structural approach and following the prototypical method The corpus of sentences related to the meanings of the words has been analyzed through an inductive content analysis supported by Nvivo10 software The social representation of Covid-19 is structured around fear, which represe...

This special issue of PSR focuses on the social representations of SARS or Covid- 19. The first study by Pizarro and colleagues analyzes the prevalence of social representations about the Covid-19 pandemic in 17 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia, their association with perceived risk and their anchoring in sociopolitical beliefs, such as RWA and SDO. The second and third articles comment on the social communication processes around Covid-19 in Brazil and France (Apostolidis, Santos, & Kalampalikis, this issue; Justo, Bousfield, Giacomozzi, & Camargo, this issue), the fourth in Italy and a last one in South Africa (de Rosa & Mannarini, this issue; Sitto & Lubinga, this issue). Three studies (fifth, sixth and seventh) examines the structure of social representations related to Covid-19 using questionnaires, the free-association technique and inductive terms like Coronavirus (Colì, Norcia & Bruzzone, this issue; Fasanelli, Piscitelli & Galli, this issue) and the new normality (Emiliani et al., this issue), analyzed by different techniques like automatic lexical analysis (IRaMuTeQ). Finally, Denise Jodelet makes a final comment and closes this issue with a reflection on Covid-19 “a separate epidemic”. In this introduction, rather than summarizing the articles, we will develop the themes and the questions they raise. Keywords: social representations, covid-19; anchorage, propaganda, conspiracy, cognitive polyphasia

The Focus :The coronavirus disease pandemic of 2019 (COVID-19) has established itself as a multidisciplinary phenomenon. No scientific discipline seems to be spared from the mysterious wind of COVID-19. While medicine and other related disciplines are likely to be directly affected by it, social science disciplines—including politics, sociology, anthropology, etc. — are also affected by the winds of this pandemic. Thus, doctors, physicists, chemists, biologists, virologists... are not the only ones to address the issues surrounding COVID-19. Political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists... can as well talk about it—and they're already doing it. Of course, everyone approaches it from the perspective and prescriptions of his or her own discipline. And in each discipline, COVID-19 is well analyzed, discussed, approached or spoken about according to several possible dimensions. Some see it as a dependent variable, while others see it as an independent variable, but also as a background or general framework for analysis. A single phenomenon that generates various observations, analyses, studies and writings. As a political scientist, I intend to express here my point of view on this COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective and prescriptions of political science. I’m going to focus on the international politics dimension, while addressing strictly speaking the issues surrounding globalization’s thematic—in order to explain why it is absurd to think, shout and believe to the end of globalization with the COVID-19’s impacts. And this focus’s point seems interesting to me, just in the sense that I wanted to circumscribe my thinking here in this paper—so as not to go in all directions, and fall into mishmash and bric-a-brac. Abstract: With the COVID-19’s impacts to humanity, some have quickly shouted, believed and thought abusively to the end of globalization. But in this paper, following to the dimension of the strategic approach of analysis, tinged with a bit of globalism, I propose to explain why globalization could not end with the COVID-19’s impacts. In total, I advance successively throughout this paper, five (5) core arguments, which together ostensibly support my central point, pointing to the impossibility of arriving at the end of globalization with the COVID-19’s impacts. These five (5) core arguments are: COVID-19 as a pro-globalization messenger: "You are living in a global village" (i), Virus complex nature (ii), Nationalism and unilateralism as COVID-19's counter-antidote strategies (iii), COVID-19's impacts nature on social-economic activities (iv), and the Global complex interdependence (v). And instead of shouting to the end of globalization, humanity should rather seek to think about, understand and internalize the different lessons that COVID-19 has just come to give it—for its best survival. Otherwise, disaster is coming.

The term Corona is borrowed from Latin meaning garland worn on the head as a mark of honour or emblem of majesty. Another example of scientific term derived from social context is Greek Nano meaning uncle or dwarf. Beginning in December 2019, in the region of Wuhan, China, a new (“novel”) coronavirus began appearing in human beings. ‘Though the disease currently spreading around the globe –COVID-19- is often called coronavirus, it’s really a disease caused by one type of coronavirus: SARS-CoV-2. Calling this particular one novel coronavirus is simply a way of making it clear which coronavirus is at issue: the new one.’ (Steinmetz, 23rd March) ‘Throughout history, nothing has killed more human beings than infectious disease. Covid-19 shows how vulnerable we remain- and how we can avoid similar pandemics in the future.’ (Walsh, 26th March) Epidemics and pandemics can wipe out the humanity very fast.

This special issue examines a subset of communications and media in Italy during the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic (January-March 2020), focusing on the ways in which social actors attempted to deal with, manage, survive and in some case even profit from a situation of high risk and deep uncertainty. Four years later, with the emergency argu- ably under control, we can now approach this critical juncture in global history with the necessary distance and objectivity.

The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) focuses on the representations of languages on signs placed in the public space and on the ways in which individuals interact with these elements. Regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, and transgressive discourses, among others, emerge in these spaces, overlapping, complementing, or opposing each other, reflecting changes taking place and, in turn, influencing them. The COVID-pandemic has a ected all aspects of life, including cities, neighborhoods, and spaces in general. Against this background, the study of the LL is fundamental not only to better understand the ways in which places have changed and how people are interpreting and experiencing them but also to analyze the evolution of COVID-discourses since the pandemic broke out. This contribution aims to investigate how and in what terms the COVIDpandemic has had an impact on the Italian LL, considered both in its entirety, as a single body that, regardless of local specificities, responded to and jointly reflected on the shared shock, and specifically, assuming the city of Florence as a case study. The data collected in the three main phases of the pandemic include photographs of virtual and urban LL signs and interviews, which were analyzed through qualitative content analysis with the aim of exploring citizens' perceptions and awareness of changes in the LL of their city. The results obtained o er a photograph of complex landscapes and ecologies, which are multimodal, multi-layered, and interactive, with public and private discourses that are strongly intertwined and often complementary. Furthermore, the diachronic analysis made it possible to identify, on the one hand, points in common with the communication strategies in the di erent phases, both at a commercial and regulatory level. On the other hand, strong di erences emerged in the bottom-up representations, characterized in the first phase by discourses of resilience, tolerance, hope, solidarity, and patriotism, and in the second and third phases by disillusionment, despair, and protest.

OPEN ACCESS. From a sociological point of view, this is a truly challenging time: a time of ‘revelation’ as well as possible ‘revolution’, capable of revealing many of the pathologies of our lifestyle. The Corona- virus crisis has exposed the way our society works in a sort of a global social experiment, which provides the opportunity to question many of the categories and paradigms of our disciplines, as well as our way of life. More profoundly, the virus has exposed the structural tensions at the basis of our social, economic, political life. Our duty as intellectuals, as teachers, and as academics is today to find a way to inhabit this tension in a more integral, inclusive, fair way rather than to dream to solve it by removing or suppressing one of the aspects at play. It is therefore necessary to explore the many possible ways to exit this situation, transforming this crisis into an opportunity for positive change. This polyphonic article, stemming from a moment of common discussion kept online, aims to be a contribution to this effort.

The rapidly evolving landscape of the global COVID-19 pandemic necessitates urgent scientific advances and adaptive behavioural and policy responses to contain viral transmission, reduce impacts on public health, and minimise societal disruption. Epidemiological models of SARS-CoV-2 transmission are heavily influencing policy responses, forecasting viral infection, transmission, and death rates under simplified representations of human behaviour. They either assume that all members of a population or demographic group behave identically or design individual behavioural rules based on demographic and mobility data. In pluralistic societies, however, individual behavioural responses vary with personal values, situational contexts, and social group identities, affecting policy compliance and viral transmission. Here, I identify and explore the impacts of salient viral identities or “COVID-19 personality types” that are emerging and fluidly coalescing with each other and existing social...