Beyond compliance: Good citizenship during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was much discussion of good (and bad) citizenship. In the UK, until a significant proportion of the population was vaccinated, much of this discussion focused on (non-)compliance with government rules concerning geographical behaviour (e.g., Webster et al., 2020;Wright et al., 2021) -rules requiring people to stay at home, meet others outside, keep two metres apart, wear face coverings in certain places, and so on. One prominent view in this discussion was developed by psychologists and behavioural scientists, who argued that: rates of compliance were generally high (Fancourt & Steptoe, 2020); examples of non-compliance were explained less by psychological factors such as panic or fatigue, and more by systematic factors such as just-in-time supply chains or lack of government support (Drury et al., 2020); and the preoccupation of government ministers and journalists with examples of non-compliance led to policy failures, including delayed lockdowns and public health messaging that set norms of non-compliance for previously compliant people to follow (Reicher & Drury, 2021).

«Sånn må det være nå.» Barns handlingsrom i barnehager under koronapandemien

“…Det var tydelige forventninger om å vise kollektivt ansvar (jf. Clarke & Barnett, 2022). Situasjonen fordret lydighet og selvdisiplinering uten for mye motstand mot ytre definerte restriksjoner.…”

Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations

“…While those problematisations are largely a product of the pandemic, they are also shaped through histories of social power, inequality and perception of different urban groups and forms of crowding (Clarke & Barnett, 2023; Joiner et al, 2022). For city governments, the key challenge was to ‘manage out’ crowds, to create the architectures and regulations that would prevent crowds and crowding of different sorts from forming, and with varying levels of success.…”

Way‐finding agendas through Transactions

“…She also thereby landmarks how these literatures can together inform research into the intersectionality of both biopolitics and its diverse netherworlds of necropolitical disenfranchisement from actionable health rights. Related work we have published in and on COVID‐19 has made allied arguments about health citizenship and biological sub‐citizenship existing on a graduated spectrum of inequalities that were at once exposed and exacerbated by the pandemic, but also mediated by intersecting conjunctural conditions ranging from carcerality and ‘emergent’ vulnerability to mutuality, solidarity, and counter‐hegemonic agency (Clarke & Barnett, 2023; Herrick et al., 2022; Mould et al., 2022; Schliehe et al., 2023; Sparke & Anguelov, 2020; Van Holstein et al., 2023). Addressing such influences in relation to the post‐pandemic city, another recent contribution points, like Senanayake, to the more‐than‐human political‐ecologies that also condition bio(in)security and associated health vulnerabilities (Marvin et al., 2023).…”