5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The COVID-19 pandemic has left a huge impact to our lives in every social and personal sphere since its outbreak. We are almost free from the stern restrictions that was adopted officially by the government and health authority but there remains some fear among the people who are in the vulnerable situation or who have a chronic disease which may worsen the damage of infectious disease. Also, we still remember a strong vaccination campaign promoted the government and health authority and huge waves of anti-vaccination discourse in the midst of the pandemic. Those events have changed people’s attitude to toward health, disease or infection prevention to some extent.

We have encountered a lot of counter-discourse claiming that the officially recommended measures to prevent the spread of infection are not merely ineffectual but also harmful to people’s health, which is often referred as “conspiracy theory”. It sometimes brings the breakups of intimate relationships such as family, friends, and community. We understand, therefore, that the pandemic has affected our physical, mental, and relational health thoroughly. In this perspective, we invite scholars and practitioners to submit paper proposals on topics related to, although not limited to, the following topics:

- the role of language to help people keep themselves safe and healthy,

- official language accepted and refused by lay people,

- discourse of media covering pandemic,

- discourse about infection in daily life,

- discourse in SNS about infection and prevention

- infodemic and daily practices, etc.