Editor's Introduction - Pandemic Politics and Phenomenology

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology , 2022

I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.-bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice" 1 I. MOTIVATIONS AND CONCERNS As the lived realities of the COVID-19 pandemic set in, academics in the humanities and social sciences quickly began interpreting and making sense of this period of transition, uncertainty, and cascading crises (Baraitser and Salisbury 2020; Bambra, Lynch, and Smith 2021; Bratton 2021). However, since the very early days of the pandemic, some commentators sought, and indeed continue to seek, pathways to our so-called "normal" pre-pandemic lives. Much of this commentary has failed to acknowledge the burden of the pre-pandemic status quo for many marginalized people, as well as foreclosing space

Language, Culture and Society, Volume 2, Issue 2, Dec 2020, p. 227 - 241 , 2020

During the confinement due to COVID-19, our research group (MIRCo) gathered together to share our views on the pandemic. Like Klemperer (2001), we developed a “quarantine diary” of the “keywords” (Williams, 2015) and expressions circulating in Spain and abroad during the lockdown. In this article, we reflect on how events are (re)constructed in discourse and how different understandings emerge and turn into social practices with transforming potential (Foucault, 2002; Martin Rojo, 2001). Our analysis of these keywords reveals two tendencies, associated with neoliberal governmentality that reinforce the disciplinary component of security: (i) the reinforcement of social discipline, which in the Spanish case was call upon individual responsibility and, for the most part, was efficiently self-imposed by citizens; (ii) the multiplication of devices and nodes of social surveillance, which took place with the engagement of the population in controlling others, and the proliferation of cyber surveillance. The struggles over the signification (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) of various keywords, such as solidarity or freedom, reveal several social tensions at different moments and places that are addressed in the article. In this article, we also turn to discourses that reflect the care practices initiated by neighborhood and activist groups in order to address the particular ways in which the pandemic has affected their communities. Exemplified by the repopularized slogan: “solo el pueblo salva al pueblo” (“only the people can save the people”), here we explore how networks of mutual aid and care at the local level challenge assumptions of the State as the primary actor for finding a way out of the crisis. Our discussion questions how “commoning” (Bollier, 2014) practices for resistance and survival might transcend the pandemic and provide keys to unlocking solutions to new (and old) social struggles.

2021

Human crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the foundations of our lives and compel questions about the possibilities for our futures. The pandemic—a crisis simultaneously medical, cultural, political, ecological, and economic—has carved new fault-lines within our societies, intensified existing ones, and also opened new possibilities for care and human solidarity. COVID-19 is, or should be, both a “wake up call” (Delanty, 2020) and a “portal” (Roy 2020). The possibilities of a post-COVID world, then, rest not only on questions of vaccination or herd immunity, but on multifaceted, human processes of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. The social sciences and humanities are powerfully placed to inform these processes and the kinds of post-COVID world we may yet inhabit. In this global, interdisciplinary conference we invite panels and papers that draw from the humanities and social science disciplines to attend to these urgent tasks of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In doing so, we also acknowledge and invite consideration of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic represents only one of many intersecting crises, both acute and ongoing, with which many people and places have had to contend. These include the ongoing crises of settler colonialism and postcoloniality, climate change, ecological destruction, as well as what theorist Lauren Berlant describes as the crisis ordinariness of precarious life in late capitalism. We seek to attend, as well, to the unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability throughout the pandemic, including between the Global South and North.

JEDNAK KSIĄŻKI 1(14), 2022

IMISCOE research series, 2023

The StOries Project has sought to 'contaminate' the academic discourse with personal stories. Any dictionary will tell you that when a substance or place is contaminated, it is suffused with dirty or otherwise harmful chemicals. We invoke the verb contaminate for two purposes. First, we want readers to keep in mind that the stories in this anthology emerged in a period in which hygiene is paramount, and viral contamination has proved to be difficult to contain despite border closures globally, bans on social gatherings, and stringent rules about isolation. Secondly, we would like to point at a divergence from the hygienic language of social scientific research. Rather, the contributions to this volume come through and share the lived experiences of immigrants to Canada. Inspired by evocative narratives such as The Wounded Storyteller (2013) by Arthur W. Frank and Narrative Power (2019) by Ken Plummer, the COVID-19 experience section of the anthology foregrounds the StOries Project participants` reflections on the early days of global pandemic. The authentic voice of the "I" claims the central stage in many of these contributions. The authors, our colleagues from the StOries Project, regard creative writing as a mode of inquiry into the lived experience. As previously clarified in this edited collection, the StOries Project invited a group of graduate students and recent alumni of different disciplinary backgrounds, and with interest in exploring their personal and family stories of migration, to share their experiences through storytelling and creative writing. Furthermore, ten of us also shared their pandemic stories. Each of these pandemic stories will appear after this introduction.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2024

Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020

On the second weekend of March 2020, just before the Canada-wide lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic was made official, we realized that we needed to take a snapshot of rapid changes that were unfolding around us. The biopolitical dimensions of public health and governmental responses to the pandemic were already clear, so we contacted Canadian-based scholars working in field of biopolitics to contribute short, rapid-response essays on the first, early stage of the pandemic. The editors at TOPIA and the University of Toronto Press graciously agreed to publish the essays online (Bird and Ironstone, 2020). In less than a week, 10 essays covering various biopolitical dimensions of the first week of the lockdown in Canada were published. The first volume, COVID-19 Essays, was written in the middle of March 2020, at exactly the moment when pandemic measures were being operationalized and the new pandemic discourse took on dramatic intensity in Canada. The short essays published then reflect the pandemic moment in which they appeared. On the one hand, critical engagement was tempered by pessimistic premonitions, much like Agamben's (2020a, 2020b), as our contributors recognized that our pandemic moment would be shaped by decades of neoliberal restructuring and would provide the justification of further extensions of governmental power into the everyday lives of people. On the other hand, our contributors expressed hope for new or renewed forms of social solidarity in which the stakes of life and death revealed during a public health crisis might inspire care, community and con-viviality. Even with the incursion of complex social processes of pandemicization, the contributors argued, profound transformation and an ethos of care was also possible. Attention could be directed not simply to self-protection and preservation , but also to social transformation and enhancement where the conditions of life and living-captured, controlled, regulated and, as the pandemic made clear, unequally distributed-might be reconfigured. There were two paths that might be travelled, and which would win out was not clear. Months into the pandemic, it is still unclear.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice