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 Gemma Lucas, Jennifer Lea, Chloe Asker Through the use of vignettes, this chapter draws on our personal, auto-ethnographic and everyday experiences to attend to bodily, affective and atmospheric (re)configurations under lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic whilst speculating upon the usefulness of thinking with non-representational theories at this time. Drawing on our own everyday experiences […]

By Felicity Thomas The International Labour Organization (ILO) recently warned of an ‘unsustainable global care crisis’, indicating that by 2030, the number of people needing care will reach 2.3 billion (Addati et al. 2018). Today, the majority of care practices are socially, culturally, economically and ecologically unsustainable. This is in large part because of a […]