Coming to Terms with a Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world as a (purportedly) novel situation with which people struggled to come to terms. The contributions to this volume show how various actors reacted to this pandemic through specific forms of representation and storytelling in popular culture, public discourse, and science communication. They demonstrate how these representations both leverage new media and resort to familiar scripts and characters to make sense of the situation. Thus, they uncover the transformative potential of narratives about epi-/pandemics across different domains and their contribution to the production of knowledge as well as the recalibration of norms and values.

Martin Butler is a professor of American literary and cultural studies at Universität Oldenburg, Germany. His research interests include popular music, forms and figures of mobility and migration as well as cultures of participation in new media environments.

Sina Farzin (M.A.) ist Fellow an der Graduate School of Social Sciences, Bremen. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen im Bereich Sozialtheorie, Gesellschaftstheorie und Systemtheorie.

Michael Fuchs is a postdoc in the Department of American Studies at Universität Innsbruck, Austria.

Fabian Hempel is a doctoral student in sociology at Universität Bremen and a research fellow at the QUEST Center for Responsible Research, Berlin Institute of Health at Charité.