The contemporary world is characterized by the massive use of digital communication platforms and services that allow people to stay in touch with each other and their organizations. On the other hand, it is also a world with great challenges in terms of crisis, disaster, and emergency situations of various kinds. Thus, it is crucial to understand the role of digital platforms/services in the context of crisis, disaster, and emergency situations. Digital Services in Crisis, Disaster, and Emergency Situations presents recent studies on crisis, disaster, and emergency situations in which digital technologies are considered as a key mediator. Featuring multi- and interdisciplinary research findings, this comprehensive reference work highlights the relevance of society's digitization and its usefulness and contribution to the different phases and types of risk scenarios. Thus, the book investigates the design of digital services that are specifically developed for use in crisis situations and examines services such as online social networks that can be used for communication purposes in emergency events. Highlighting themes that include crisis management communication, risk monitoring, digital crisis intervention, and smartphone applications, this book is of particular use to governments, institutions, corporations, and professionals who deal with crisis, disaster, and emergency scenarios, as well as researchers, academicians, and students working in fields such as communications, multimedia, sociology, political science, and engineering.

Renowned Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben collects all of his fierce, passionate, and deeply personal interventions regarding the 2020 health emergency as it played out in Italy and across the world. Alongside and beyond accusations, these texts variously reflect upon the great transformation affecting Western democracies. In the name of biosecurity and health, the model of bourgeois democracy-together with its rights, parliaments, and constitutions-is everywhere surrendering to a new despotism where citizens seem to accept unprecedented limitations to their freedoms. This leads to the urgency of the volume's title: Where Are We Now? For how long will we accept living in a constantly extended state of exception, the end of which remains impossible to see?

While under lockdown, women's work expanded exponentially, especially care work at home, including emotional care work. What the pandemic exposed is the unpaid care work that most women perform. Midway through the stages of lockdown researchers started to do surveys to find out what is happening to women, expressing the results of the research in statistical terms. Yet, this research does not get to the heart of the matter: women's lived experience of an historical epoch - of a virus spreading at breakneck speed across geographical boundaries, condemning the whole world to viral infections, state sanctioned lockdowns and death.

This has never happened before, so no-one was prepared for what was to come and how to handle the crisis. This collection of essays captures the existential feelings of anxiety, angst and uncertainty. They also express exhaustion, discovering new dimensions of life and rethinking priorities in the face of a rupture of what has gone before. What we hear in these essays are the voices of women speaking to this pandemic and what lockdown has meant to them and for them.

Some essays are written with raw emotion, others in beautiful poetic prose, some in poetry. Through the essays runs a golden thread of coming to terms with a new way of life and what it means to be a woman, a mother, a partner, a friend and a Covid-19 victim in the year that will be known as the year of the pandemic. The writers are from all walks and stages of life and the book represents stories from a range of different countries.

This collection of essays will help readers to make sense of the impact of Covid-19 on everyday reality.

In this age of uncertainty, there is the need for ideas that transcend the limitations of party political, or left/right thinking, in resolving the unprecedented problems of our time. Technological Civilisation is here presented as a focal point for a fresh perspective of both national and international issues. The tensions between America and China indicate the possibility of a new Cold War, and this would be disastrous for the planet in diverting attention away from the cooperation needed in attending to climate change and other threats to the environment. In the countries of the West, democracy as we know it is beginning to disintegrate. This is made evident through the collapse of voting figures and party memberships, as well as a spirit of disillusion. There are some topics which politicians are loathed to address, and in the sphere of the approaching environmental crisis, the population explosion is the most prominent. Leading scientists have clearly demonstrated, that even if all efforts are put towards reversing climate change through maximising renewable energy sources, unless population control is achieved on a sufficient level, all will be in vain. The population question is probably pushed ahead to a greater degree in this book than will be found elsewhere as a topic for public debate. In concentrating on Technological Civilisation, it is possible to discern the inter-connection of problems, and this leads to constructive proposals for the regeneration of democracy, the reform of the financial-industrial system, and the emergence of an upwardly mobile and free egalitarian society.