COVID-19 and Shame

Fred Cooper is a research fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter, UK. He is a historian of loneliness, health, medicine, and the psy and social sciences, and co-investigator (with Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose) on the AHRC urgent grant ‘Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19’.Luna Dolezal is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK.Arthur Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter, UK.

This book on COVID-19 and the role shame and shaming has played in the handling of the pandemic in the UK and elsewhere is much to be welcomed. It offers both a sophisticated understanding of a multidimensional concept and a wide-ranging analysis of its personal, social and political salience for pandemic governance and for how people struggled to make sense of their changed lives. The authors are to be congratulated for their accessible reporting of a ground-breaking piece of research.

• Introduction - ‘The Public Shaming Pandemic’ Chapter 1 - Covidiots!: The Language of PandemicChapter 2 - Super-spreaders: Shaming Healthcare ProfessionalsChapter 3 - Coughing while Asian: Shame and Racialized BodiesChapter 4 - “I was too fat”: Boris Johnson and the Fat PanicChapter 5 - Good Solid British Common Sense: Shame and Surveillance in Everyday LifeChapter 6 - Operation Moonshot: Notes on Saving Face Conclusion – Beyond Plague Island