In category: Care and Communities

By Michael Schillmeier With COVID-19 we experience the dramatic effects of a cosmopolitical event by which a non-human actor politicizes, i.e. unbuttons the normalcy of the ‘cosmos’ of shared lived spaces, what we take for granted as and what we expect from a globalized life-world. The dynamics of infection unfold an existential learning situation not […]

By Catherine Leyshon and Jen Siggs Healthy Ageing through Innovation in Rural Europe (HAIRE) is a project operating in eight rural communities – two each in Belgium, France, the Netherlands and the UK (Cornwall and East Sussex) –that seeks to address loneliness and isolation in rural areas, not least in the context of COVID-19.  The […]

By Mark Jackson As the COVID-19 pandemic continues with little sign of abating, it is clear that measures to reduce transmission come with very high social and economic costs. Strategies are now changing with those costs in mind, and the WHO has recommended that diverse communities should be engaged as this transition takes place. In […]

For many of us, our experience of the COVID-19 crisis has been largely defined by experiences of absence — including the absence of everyday routines and possibilities for social interaction that we normally take for granted. In this work, we explore loneliness as an emotion that essentially concerns absence, or the feeling that certain social […]

The time of COVID-19 represents a distinct, but currently under-defined and under-theorised, temporal moment. Using semiotic methods, this paper examines how the mechanical actions of the virus, through becoming social, create a new viral time, heralding an already-arrived new historical epoch. This epoch, which is simultaneously both homogenous and undifferentiated at one tempo, and supercharged […]

In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – […]

Despite the first case of the novel coronavirus only being reported to the WHO at the end of December 2019, humanities and social science scholars have been quick to subject local, national and international responses to COVID-19 to critique. Through television and radio, blogs, social media and other outlets, historians in particular have situated the […]

By Laura Salisbury Waiting and Care in Pandemic Times’ is a collection of papers about time and care, written under conditions of lockdown in the UK in March and April 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It represents the initial thoughts of a group of interdisciplinary scholars in the humanities and social sciences who have been […]

By Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose During the COVID-19 crisis, the use of shame has been prominent and we discuss how this has impacted on healthcare workers in particular. As frontline representatives of healthcare, doctors are particularly vulnerable to shame and shaming. Issues which directly affect a doctor’s ability to deliver healthcare effectively, including long […]