How Worldviews Shape Social Responsibility: Religious and Secular Narratives of the Body, the Virus, and the State in the Covid-19 Crisis
In recent decades Switzerland’s religious landscape has become increasingly pluralistic. This diversity is reflected in the range of religious and secular world views that helped people interpret the completely new conditions they had to live under during the pandemic. In turn, these interpretations play a role in individual and collective decision-making, including compliance with measures and recommendations issued by government to limit infections.
This project will investigate how people and institutions belonging to different religious and secular contexts talk about their own bodies, the state and the virus, and how elements of their underlying world views shape their perceptions, attitudes and social actions.
The aim of the project is to investigate the role that religious and secular world views play in people’s compliance with government regulations, recommendations and established practices for containing the pandemic. The project will investigate how individual and collective players in religious and secular settings use or used stories and narratives to interpret the Covid-19 pandemic and how these stories and narratives construe and present the pandemic, the role of the state and each individual’s body.
The project is part of the Swiss National Research Programme 80 “Covid-19 in Society.”