Editorial

This issue of Social Science Information goes to print at a moment when human social life on the planet is in turmoil. Everyone was expecting – and indeed already experiencing – a transformation in the way human beings live, namely through climate change, and this transformation was supposed to be enormous in scope, literally enveloping the globe, but also gradual, non-localizable and difficult to measure both in its causes and in its effects. While climate change is going on and arguably accelerating, another planetary event occurred that has very different characteristics: its cause is small and local and very well identifiable; its diffusion is very quick but can in principle be precisely traced, even though at considerable investigative effort and cost; it directly hits the human body, and furthermore, it diffuses through human contact. Despite these differences, Covid-19 quickly occupied the central place in public consciousness, which had been firmly held by climate change only a few months ago. Just like climate scientists before, epidemiologists and virologists have now entered the public stage, in both cases accompanied by mathematical modelers, given that much information is available about the present, but little about the future. At the same time, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have felt called upon to analyze the new situation created by these phenomena. Even though neither the climate nor the virus are part of their core expertise, in both respects the causes and the consequences have their roots in the social world. Both phenomena, thus, raise questions about key concerns of the social sciences and the humanities: about the ways in which experiences of the past shape expectations of the future; about the role of imagination in reducing uncertainties and providing orientation; about the organization of knowledgeproduction and its impact on forms of knowledge; about the relation between biological and geological knowledge, on the one hand, and social and cultural knowledge, on the other; about changes in social practices in response to institutional changes; and about ways of representing difference in political institutions, among many others. This issue of SSI is neither about climate change nor about Covid-19. But, in the tradition of the journal, it addresses some of these key questions under particular aspects. A special section, edited by Maxim Khomyakov, is devoted to tracing the imagination and conceptualization of collective phenomena by looking at Russian history and society in