Tuesday, March 15th, 2022 Pandemic, Populism, and Processes of “Societalization:” Understanding Taiwan’s Democracy through its COVID Experience

Description

While Taiwan’s relative success at containing COVID-19 is now a familiar story, the pandemic also provides an empirical window for gaining new insights about the strengths and vulnerabilities of Taiwan’s democracy. Engaging theories of “societalization,” populism, and political drama, this presentation will analyze the civil society mechanisms that served to prompt institutional reforms for enhancing Taiwan’s pandemic preparedness, as well as to facilitate a discourse of civic inter-dependence among its politically-divided citizenry. At the same time, we will discuss how local trends of populism were intensified through the dramatization of panic and resentment. Finally, the presentation analyzes how counter-populists’ performances of hope and other positive emotions served to contain the populist mobilization – but at a price. Broadly speaking, Taiwan’s COVID experiences highlight new directions for conversations about the legitimation crisis of democracy.

Ming-Cheng M. Lo is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is currently co-Editor of the British Sociological Association journal Cultural Sociology. Professor Lo’s research focuses on the cultural codes, narratives, and networks in East Asian civil societies. She has also written about the sense-making processes regarding disasters and cultural traumas. Applying similar cultural approaches to medical sociology, her research also addresses how individuals make sense of healing, illness, and suffering, and how medicine intersects with politics, ethnicity, colonialism, and neoliberalism. Lo is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press, 2002; Japanese edition published in 2014). She co-edited the Handbook of Cultural Sociology (Routledge, 2010; Second edition published in 2019). Lo has published actively on culture, civil society, and health and illness in sociology and interdisciplinary journals.