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This collection sheds light on the cascading crises engendered by COVID-19 on many aspects of society from the economic to the digital. This issue of the American Behavioral Scientist brings together scholarship examining the various ways in which many vulnerable populations are bearing a disproportionate share of the costs of COVID-19. As the articles bring to light, the unequal effects of the pandemic are reverberating along preexisting fault lines and creating new ones. In the economic realm, the rental market emerges during the pandemic as an economic arena of heightened socio-spatial and racial/ethnic disparities. Financial markets are another domain where market mechanisms mask the exploitative relationships between the economically vulnerable and powerful actors. Turning to gender inequalities, across national contexts, women represent an increasingly vulnerable segment of the labor market as the pandemic piles on new burdens of remote schooling and caregiving despite a variety of policy initiatives. Moving from the economic to the digital domain, we see how people with disabilities employ social media to mitigate increased vulnerability stemming from COVID-19. Finally, the key effects of digital vulnerability are heightened because the digitally disadvantaged experience not only informational inequalities but also aggravated bodily manifestations of stress or anxiety related to the pandemic. Each article contributes to our understanding of the larger mosaic of inequality that is being exacerbated by the pandemic. By drawing connections between these different aspects of the social world and the effects of COVID-19, this issue of American Behavioral Scientist advances our understanding of the far-reaching ramifications of the pandemic on vulnerable members of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic—unlike other crises—have impacted almost every facet of our lives. The pandemic has deepened existing inequalities and created new vulnerabilities related to social isolation, incarceration, involuntary exclusion from the labor market, diminished economic opportunity, life-and-death risk in the workplace, and a host of emergent digital, emotional, and economic divides. In tandem, many less advantaged individuals and groups have suffered disproportionate hardship related to the pandemic in the form of fear and anxiety, exposure to misinformation, and the effects of the politicization of the crisis. Many of these phenomena will have a long tail that we are only beginning to understand. Nonetheless, the research also offers evidence of resilience on several fronts including nimble organizational response, emergent communication practices, spontaneous solidarity, and the power of hope. While we do not know what the post COVID-19 world will look like, the scholarship here tells us that the virus has not exhausted society's adaptive potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]