Identity in the COVID-19 Years

Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He leads a number of major funded research projects on young people, health and wellbeing and digital and broadcast media, publishing widely on topics related to digital cultures in the context of social identities, young people, suicide prevention and resilience. He is the author of Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (2012), Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculinity and Ethics (2015), Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (2016) and Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (2019), Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacies (with A Bartlett and K Clarke;2019), and Population, Mobility and Belonging: Understanding Population Concepts in Media, Culture and Society (2020).

How do we make sense of the individual and global trauma caused by COVID? Cover frames the pandemic by wrestling sense out of the inchoate panic, offering a major, wholistic cultural analysis of the pandemic and its enduring effects. In addressing the structural and discursive truths that the pandemic has exposed, he is also mindful of the personal devastation that COVID has wrought. COVID changed our social ecology, and we need a reckoning. Start here.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Stories of Rupture and Resilience in a Pandemic 1 Media Discourses of Coronavirus: From Health Advisory to Conspiracy 2 Apocalyptic Fictions as a Roadmap for Crisis3 Disrupted Identity: The Self in a Time of Radical Cultural Change, Anxiety, and Crisis 4 Disrupted Mobility: Lockdowns, Borders, and Movement 5 Disrupted Exposure: Ethics and the Face of the Other in the Time of Masks6 Disrupted Touch: Hands, Bodies, and Social Distancing7 Disrupted Corporealities: Vaccination and Anti-vaxxers8 Disrupted Futurity: Mourning the Self and the OtherConclusion: COVID Futures: Ethical Care in InterdependencyReferencesIndex