This narrative account of the working career of Kenyan popular “live band” musician Awillo Mike in 2020 explores the contribution that musicking makes to social resilience. Ethnographic and literary methods were used to construct a story of one artist’s struggles to survive and sustain his music career during the COVID-19 pandemic—a story that demonstrates how musicking is an everyday entertainment practice that fulfils deep psychological needs, persisting even in the most difficult circumstances by adapting. The account also contends that musicking directly and indirectly supports community resilience.

This paper examines Ghana’s COVID-19 response through a biopolitical and biosecurity lens. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, it analyzes how interventions such as lockdowns, biosurveillance, and vaccination campaigns functioned both as technologies of care and instruments of control, expanding state authority over biological and social life. The study shows that biopolitics in Ghana did not replicate Western models but emerged as a provincialized and context-dependent form of power shaped by infrastructural constraints, informal economies, and postcolonial state formation. Pandemic governance was, therefore, adaptive and improvisational, requiring negotiation between epidemiological control and socioeconomic survival. By bringing biopolitics into dialogue with postcolonial theory and necropolitics, the paper conceptualizes pandemic governance as a hybrid regime in which life-preserving and life-abandoning logics coexist. It thus challenges universalist assumptions and repositions the Global South as central to rethinking the governance of life.

Personal networks provide crucial support during crises, yet people are embedded in different network types that structure unequal access to such resources. The current study integrates these perspectives to examine whether—and how—network turnover contributed to disparities in mental health across socioeconomic status (SES) groups during the pandemic. Using two-wave panel data from the COVID-19 Pandemic and Social Network Panel Study (2020–2021), an egocentric network study of the college population in Wuhan, we employ random forests and spectral clustering to identify 7 types of core networks based on 43 network variables (i.e., Family, Friend, Restricted, Family & Community, School & Career, Just Activity, and Homebody). We find that as local social-distancing policies tightened, respondents increasingly shifted to Family and Friend networks and withdrew from School & Career and Just Activity. Individual fixed-effect models reveal that these network turnovers have heterogeneous mental health consequences net of observed and time-invariant unobserved confounders. Moving into Family and Friend networks yields the most favorable mental health outcomes for higher-SES groups, whereas benefits are less pronounced and even reversed among lower-SES groups. This pattern is consistent with SES-based differences in social support available in these network types. The current research advances an updated machine-learning approach for identifying personal network typologies. It also shows how the pandemic laid bare unequal resources embedded in personal networks and intensified health-related social inequality, underscoring the need to theorize network effects as contingent on individuals’ social status and the contexts in which networks are formed and embedded.

Changes in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic included emergency benefit allotments and operation waivers. Using five expenditure-based measures of the nutritional quality of food purchases, we tested whether changes in SNAP during the first year of the pandemic were associated with better nutritional quality of food purchases by participating households with children relative to income-eligible nonparticipating households. Most nutritional quality measures declined from 2019 (pre-pandemic) to 2020 (pandemic) with larger decreases for SNAP households. SNAP participation was associated with small negative differences for nutritional quality of food purchases from stores.

The Covid-19 pandemic has negatively affected labour markets, among other aspects of life. This study examines the impact of the discouraged worker effect during the pandemic, focusing on the Turkish labour market from 2018 to 2021. Although few studies exist on this topic, they rely on labour force participation rates, whereas our dataset includes direct questions and data specifically related to the discouraged worker effect, allowing for a microeconomic analysis. Probit regression results show that the discouraged worker effect was stronger during the pandemic, with job seekers being 1.6% more likely to become discouraged than before. Higher education levels generally reduce this likelihood, both before and during the pandemic. While age negatively correlates with discouragement, this effect diminishes with increasing age. Single women were more adversely affected than single men and married women than married men. Higher unemployment rates increase discouragement, as expected, while an increase in the unemployment rate has a greater effect on individuals during the pandemic period. Findings suggest that the pandemic had a disproportionate impact on certain individuals, particularly with respect to education level and gender, while Türkiye’s societal structure may help explain the observed gender-based differences.

This paper is an act of remembrance, a testimony to the horrors inflicted on our lives and bodies as women prisoners of Tihar Jail No. 6, Delhi. It documents the struggles for life and survival of fellow women prisoners, and bears witness to the deaths of Fiza and Jesca. Through these experiences, I argue that the measures introduced in the lockdown prison during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic did not merely respond to a public health emergency, but inaugurated a field of penal experimentation that emboldened existing practices of custodial violence and sought to establish a new regime of impunity aligned with Hindutva politics. I demonstrate how isolation cells came to function as de-facto solitary confinement, how the jail manual was effectively suspended, how the right to life was stratified into hierarchies of “deservingness” by High Powered Committees, and how daily prison life was restructured through intensified surveillance.

The National Project on Achievement in Twins (NatPAT) is a twin project based in the United States (US) that began in 2017. Using a cohort sequential design, the overall goal of the initial project was to uncover salient factors, including genetic and environmental influences, which contribute to the co-development of reading and math performance during elementary school. In 2022, the focus of NatPAT pivoted towards a new focus on the COVID-19 pandemic’s short- and long-term impacts on children’s reading achievement. In addition, a genomics data collection began. New enrollment into the registry continues every year, but currently NatPAT follows 1997 twin pairs and their families as they progress through school. The project supports open science principles, with open materials and code, preregistration, and shared data. Here we present the goals of the project, summarize recent results, methods and materials, with a focus on the integration across many different data sources, and future directions of the project.

How do partisan differences in mass behavior and attitudes vary across contexts? Using new individual-level panel data on the COVID-19 pandemic from 54,216 US adults between March 2020 and September 2021, we consider how partisan differences vary according to the personal costs and benefits of behaviors, their public symbolism, and elite-level policy choices. Employing various panel data estimators, including difference-in-differences, we evaluate how partisan gaps evolve across changes to the political and health contexts, including the national vaccine rollout, individual vaccination status, and within-state policy variation. We find partisan divides are substantial even in (ostensibly) apolitical domains, although they are tempered by higher net personal costs to actions, lower public symbolism, and elite policy choices that counter national party cues.

The development of philanthropic foundations in China is constrained by both state corporatism and the ‘administrative absorption of society.’ In this study, we use the term ‘absorptive philanthropic governance’ to describe the process where absorption is combined with intentional space for collaboration within the governance of the philanthropic sector. This concept elucidates how these two elements interact and influence each other to achieve a balance with which civil society organizations retain the capacity for autonomous social initiatives, even under the corporatist state. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted these dynamics. Employing interviews and case studies of 13 philanthropic foundations active in China’s COVID-19 disaster relief, we delineate their institutional positioning and identify the unique agendas, mobilization strategies, and social objectives of each type of foundations. The findings reveal both the differentiation among foundations and the resilience of the civil society sector, suggesting that, despite the current heightened political control, the evolving patterns of philanthropic governance in China signal potential for civil society development in the future.