Journaling the COVID‐19 pandemic: Locality, scale, and spatialised bodies

Abstract

COVID‐19 has reconfigured, reaffirmed, and revealed socio‐material geographies in Australia and around the world. The pandemic is international but experiences of it exist in situated contexts. From strategies organising the human body by placing tape on supermarket floors to those using helicopter surveillance to identify illegal Easter barbecues, the impacts of COVID‐19 are mediated across different scales and are not experienced equally. In this article, I show how the COVID‐19 pandemic has revealed and compounded injustices and presented an opportunity to confront them. COVID‐19 is expressed via the production and circulation of meaning and diverse practices involving or implicating bodies, localities, and scales; among them one might include the advent of social distancing, the invention of “Fortress Tasmania,” from whence this work is written, and the constitution of bodies as dangerous yet vulnerable. I use autoethnography as an early career researcher and student trying to make sense of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This situated experience offers empirical diversity, context, and evocative narratives to enrich understandings of COVID‐19. The autoethnography is both a therapeutic outlet for a journaling, isolating honours student in suburban Tasmania and an attempt to make sense of body, locality, and scale in the geographies of pandemic.

Hope and everyday crisis: Young adult experiences in COVID‐free Tasmania

“…Questions about the right to grief amidst disparate experiences of disruption are an emerging subject from the COVID‐19 pandemic (Burton, 2021; Varshney et al, 2021). Examples of hope, opportunity, and others’ experiences may be a means of discussing the pain and grief of the pandemic while negotiating sociocultural expectations.…”

Assemblage Thinking in Lockdown: An Autoethnographic Approach

“…I also hope that this article will be followed by further research on present-day cultural production, autoethnographic and otherwise, and which can help “pluralize the experience” (Stanley 2015, 163) of everyday life during COVID-19. While much interesting work is already emerging (Burton 2021; de Klerk 2020; Erni and Striphas 2021; Harris and Jones 2021; Kawalec 2020; Prior 2020; Stanley 2020), it is pertinent that the dialogue I am contributing towards here encompasses within it successive temporal stages, more actants (especially vaccines, but also variants of the virus), occupying different social positionalities, in cultures across the world. Given that this pandemic is bearing on lived experience for billions across the globe, especially now in the Global South, COVID-19 restrictions as a cultural and social phenomenon—in all their heterogeneity—merit scholarly understanding.…”

The road to “local green recovery”: Signposts from COVID‐19 lockdown life in the UK

“…From a relatively early stage in the global pandemic, emergent policy discourses globally (WHO, 2020) and in the UK (Climate Assembly UK, 2020; Hanna et al, 2020) presented COVID‐19 as an opportunity to kick‐start a “green recovery” that puts environmental and economic sustainability in direct partnership. While this discourse has largely focused on the macro‐level picture of national government policy, we argue that investigating responses to the pandemic at the local scale could usefully inform and enable local “green recoveries” (Burton, 2021; Searle et al, 2021).…”

“…This has prompted a mix of emotions, with pleasure, joy, and relief often tempered or even overwhelmed by sadness, anxiety, fear, or frustration (Li et al, 2020; Rajkumar, 2020). We therefore acknowledge the enormous practical and emotional challenges wrought by COVID‐19 for people from a range of circumstances, and the role of material and natural environments in mediating these, whether for better or worse (Burton, 2021). Notwithstanding the significant – and problematic – racialised, classed, and gendered variations in lived experiences of lockdown (Turhan, 2021), there has been a common requirement to adapt to and cope with the pandemic‐induced restrictions on everyday life.…”