Suchergebnisse

"This edited collection sheds light on how the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing social issues, and it stresses the importance of understanding, analyzing, and critiquing law and policy decisions during times of crisis. Specifically, it brings together a diverse array of scholarly work that highlights various legal and policy-related topics, including litigations, zoombombing, international students' experiences, violence against women, sex workers' health, governmental crisis responses, neo-vagrancy laws, and educational issues. The collection offers multi-disciplinary scholarly insights, preliminary research findings, legal and public policy analysis, and educational guidelines to address unprecedented socio-legal and psychological impacts on society that have evolved since the onset of the pandemic. Further, these chapters add to the ongoing dialogue about how North American society can improve by exploring dilemmas and highlighting opportunities for positive change. Thus, this collection sheds light on how vulnerable communities have been disproportionately impacted by governments' policies and laws since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it aims to give a different perspective on how we can move forward and use these occurring issues to create more justice in a post-COVID society"--

The coronavirus disease-19 pandemic introduced a crisis of safety and relevance for dating apps, as their affordances for facilitating in-person encounters posed the risk of viral transmission. This article examines how eight apps primarily catering to heterosexual markets responded to the pandemic through changes to socio-technical arrangements, new user prescriptions, and the curation of corporate data and success stories. By analyzing corporate social media and promotional materials alongside in-app developments, we find that these companies reimagined app affordances to promote "virtual dating," a set of practices and symbolic meanings that prioritize visual, synchronous digital interaction as the most responsible, reliable, and successful dating approach to the pandemic. Virtual dating centers apps as databases of potential partners while prescribing modes of use aimed toward affective relief, displays of authenticity, and romantic courtship. This reimagining counters moral panics about digitally mediated relationships by resorting to heteronormative dating scripts while overlooking alternative app uses.