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Life, in many ways, is simply grief waiting to happen. It is the emotions of death – simultaneously something ordinary and universal as well as extraordinary and unique – that we try to capture and make sense of with the notion of ‘grief’. The so-called ‘corona pandemic’ that has spread throughout the world during the past 2–3 years is in many ways a crisis of global proportions that, at its very core, is caused by and concerned with the fear of death and dying from a deadly disease. So far, six million people have died in the corona pandemic. The ways we grieve and mourn our dead are indicative and informative of the society/culture in which we live and the values, norms and ideas that prevail within it. This chapter deals with the emotion and practice of grief as it is particularly related to experiences of death and dying in a contemporary Western corona-ridden society. I explore challenges relating to the display of emotions, ritual practice and ceremonial closure – as well as the paradoxical way in which the corona pandemic has inaugurated a new great disappearing act of death and grief at a time when death and grief have been paramount experiences for many affected people. Today, we know more about grief than at any other time in human history, but the question remains whether we have become any better at accepting it, dealing with it and living with it.

The utterly un-nostalgic person is probably a non-existent being. At both a personal and collective level, we explore how nostalgia is experienced and in demand during times of transition, disjuncture, conflict and uncertainty. This chapter explores the emotion of nostalgia and connects it specifically to the current corona pandemic – the challenges of lockdowns and social distancing measures on interaction, feelings of loneliness and a generalised sense of uncertainty and despair, and also a rise of nostalgia as a possible response to these challenges. The predominant view of nostalgia put forth in this chapter is that nostalgia has the capacity to provide a great deal of benefit (meaning, hope, direction and purpose) to individuals, groups, institutions and societies at large. Indeed, nostalgia can be a tranquil feeling in a fearful world. We relate nostalgia to studies and experiences from the pandemic period and speculate on how the so-called ‘corona crisis’ may impact feelings of nostalgia in the post-pandemic world – perhaps even a nostalgia and longing for the pandemic period itself.

If the corona pandemic has in fact sparked a new (or renewed) interest in nostalgia in contemporary society due to the corona pandemic, it may indeed prove to be a positive thing, particularly if it makes it easier for people to deal with current feelings of adversity and anxiety. We suggest the nostalgia mood that is generated and perpetuated by the continuing twists and turns of the corona pandemic may – in the short and long run – prove useful in coping with and giving meaning to the problems and perplexing circumstances of life, rather than being a regressive phenomenon. Perhaps, something good may, in the end, grow from something bad?

In this paper, the author advocates recognizing, developing, and promoting “critical interactionism” as a legitimate and pragmatically useful scholarly project. The author argues that critical interactionism includes different interactionist traditions, critical approaches, methodological styles, and sensitizing concepts – as long as they tell us something about how power and inequality operate. I review two fundamental elements of this project that constitute its past and likely future: (1) theoretical interventions that excavate critical insights, diversify founders, integrate critical theories, and promote interactionism's usefulness for critical inquiry and (2) empirically grounded conceptual interventions that shed light on generic processes of inequality reproduction. Although the larger discipline of sociology continues to marginalize interactionism yet selectively adopt its principles, critical interactionism has the potential to break through what David Maines called the fault line of consciousness. The promise of critical interactionism is that it can simultaneously make interactionism more relevant to our discipline and make our discipline more relevant to the social world.