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This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.

This chapter uses the pandemic crisis to explore the social processes that structure happiness and shape fantasies of living a happy life. Considered herein are issues of human potential, gendered and classed possibility and people's differing chances in cultivating a sense of satisfaction in ‘being happy’, despite living through COVID-19. Interviews with 40 Australian women living during lockdown restrictions with varying levels of social, cultural and economic capital are utilised to make sense of women's happiness. Vastly different avenues for achieving a happiness fantasy outside of drinking alcohol were possible for more privileged women than for those in middle and working classes. The classed differences in women's gendered roles in managing emotions (their own and other people's) and their chances to be happy are exemplified in how the changes to the structure of the day that resulted from COVID-19 restrictions did not devastate or cause stress (as we heard from working-class women) or need to be filtered or blocked out using alcohol in order to retain balanced emotions (as we heard from middle-class women) but rather provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of their happiness fantasy. We deduce that for those with less agency available to control their chances of living a happy life, prevailing COVID-19 discourse that places happiness within individual responsibility and focuses on personal resilience rather than tending to the conditions for flourishing, is problematic.

This paper aims to discuss the development of two toolkits that were designed to help communities and households measure their level of disaster resilience and provide practical tools to help them increase and maintain these levels.

The toolkits were developed across two studies, with the community toolkit development being undertaken first. A literature review was conducted to develop a definition and model of community disaster resilience; and a Scorecard was designed to assess levels of existing community disaster resilience. The definition and Scorecard were reviewed and refined with the help of two communities before a final version was trialled in four communities across Australia. The household toolkit project followed a similar approach, with trialling being undertaken in conjunction with two non-government organisations that carry out outreach work in the community.

The development and trial of the Scorecards was extremely valuable. The conclusion voiced by communities and reached by the study project teams was that the user-friendly Scorecard is a workable tool for people to assess their household and community disaster resilience and to come together to plan what might further strengthen resilience. Critical to the Scorecards’ success was an understanding of the purpose of the assessment tool and the meaning of resilience.

The toolkits take an all-hazards approach and help community members, individuals and local policymakers to set priorities, allocate funds and develop emergency and disaster management programmes that build local community resilience.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust considerations have been amplified to levels not seen in most of our lifetimes. We have been asked to trust: epidemiologists, virologists and immunologists in terms of the nature of COVID-19 transmission and vaccinations; politicians, public health planners and policymakers in terms of the need for various responses such as lockdowns, school closures, border closures and economic recovery plans; media sources in terms of accurately reporting COVID-19 news; and members of our community in terms of doing their best to protect themselves and others from COVID-19 transmission, including mask wearing, hand washing, isolating and social/physical distancing. Within this chapter, we attempt to explore the emotional responses to this complex web of trust considerations from qualitative data in a study we conducted amidst the beginning of the pandemic. We then offer some interpretations about how trust considerations may have been altered as a result of living in and through the pandemic. We suggest that trust can be a primary emotion, or at least function that way during times of crises, and be (reflexively) deployed by citizens to manage emotional repertoires during crisis and to position themselves as responsible neoliberal citizens. We add understanding about the strains in horizontal/interpersonal trust relations during a pandemic – where the virus spreading between people necessitates social and relational distancing measures for containment – and inflames questions about whether or not we can trust each other.

This study seeks to explore health workers' perceptions and experiences on incentives for motivating and retaining them in primary health-care facilities in rural Ghana.

Phenomenological research design was used to explore health workers’ experiences and perceptions on their incentive packages. Sixty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted with health-care workers in primary health-care facilities and analyzed using thematic analysis approach.

The findings show health-care workers’ perceptions on their incentives, ranging from low awareness, unfair distribution, favoritism, means of punishment and incentives regarded unattractive. The preferred incentive packages identified were salary increase, housing availability, recognition, adequate supplies, and risk and responsibility allowances. Health-care workers suggested for the modification of incentives including vehicle importation waiver, reduction in study leave years and opportunity to pursue desired courses.

The findings suggest that incentives that align with health-care workers’ preferences can potentially improve their motivation and influence retention. Health-care workers’ concern on incentives having been used as favors and punishment as well as unfair distribution should be addressed by health managers and policymakers, to achieve the desired purpose of motivating and retaining them in rural areas. Appropriate internal monitoring mechanisms are needed for incentives regulation and to improve health workers’ retention in rural Ghana.

Anger responding to government-imposed COVID-19 pandemic mandates is examined in relation to 2021 international reports of street protests in cities, with a focus on Perth, Western Australia. Angry protestors displayed a variety of signs and symbols, united under banners demanding freedom. A multi-disciplinary analysis attends to distrust in public health mandates in the global context of an insecure biosphere. Mandates can signify symbolic death, and anger an ‘immune’ response to lifeworld constraints. Anger among nurses and vaccine-hesitant protestors signifies ethical rejection of super-imposed mandates, and fear of alleged vaccine harms. Official pandemic communications are held to be ill-timed, lacking information meaningful to diverse citizens' needs, and offset by poorly contextualised data and unreliable pre-packaged interpretations communicated via digital technologies. A novel hypothesis proposes semiotic misrecognition of the global nature of communications from intersecting ecosocial crises may underlie protestors' anger. Modelling of a management system to validate broad contextual knowledges may restore meaningful balance and public solidarity, to creatively respond to future human crises.

Seligman is an important and ironically somewhat neglected figure today in the history of American economic thought. However, an examination of his scholarly achievements reveals that he had a considerable impact on the development of professional economics in America and could count the most influential economists in Europe as personal friends and collaborators (Moss, 2003; Rutherford, 2004; Mehrotra, 2005). Asso and Fiorito (2006), in their introduction to Seligman's autobiography (1929) argue that ‘his personal influence as an academic economist, as a teacher and as a central figure in the dissemination of economic knowledge was second to none and perhaps more meaningful than any single work he wrote’ (p. 1). They also record (quoting his student, Alvin Johnson) that ‘with Seligman…American economics began to acquire a distinctive professional reputation, some very high scholarly standards and a sort of “moral magnificence”’ (p. 2). What this means is that through Seligman's work and guidance economics came to encompass a moral dimension that fed through into social policies, many of which were adopted by American legislatures. The major influences on his method included the German Historical School and a number of heterodox Continental writers that informed Seligman's in great Whig interpretation of the development of economics. He also engaged critically with the more abstract methods of contemporary economic analysis of the early twentieth century.