Paper short abstract:

This paper studies the everyday meaning-making initiatives of African citizens during the Covid pandemic, based on a textual-visual analysis of African artwork. It compares innovative survival techniques, depicted in the art work and street graffiti found in mega African cities.

Paper long abstract:

It has been almost 27 months since the outbreak of the coronavirus disease, known as the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanity did not turn to live inside caves in protection against the virus’ lethal impacts. They invented different survival techniques for their mental, psychological, and physiological health. Based on the aforementioned, this paper is about studying the resilient narratives of people’s everyday practices on the face of COVID-19 pandemic. It studies different meaning-making initiatives of African citizens based on a textual-visual analysis of some of the African artwork presented during the first-second waves of the pandemic. The paper does not limit itself to the analytical scope of a particular society; as it studies different innovative survival techniques, as depicted in the art work and street graffiti, practiced by African citizens in mega African cities in order to create a meaning out of the entire context. These narratives will reflect the context, the actors, the hidden and manifest narratives, the techniques, and the explicit and underlined goals which reflect several social and cultural transformations in relation to the sociology of living through pandemics. The analyzed discourse will encompass an assemblage of verbal and non-verbal forms of expressions using visual-textual analysis of different resilient techniques from all over the world. The main findings highlight different implications of the Corona pandemic on the social and cultural levels, with its positive and negative aspects together, and how the pandemic has brought about social and cultural changes in our societies, in addition to reviewing a number of specialized academic concepts in the field of sociology - the science of studying society and culture.