Negotiating risks and responsibilities during lockdown: ethical reasoning and affective experience in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Over forty-nine days of Level 4 and Level 3 lockdown, residents of Aotearoa New Zealand were subject to 'stay home' regulations that restricted physical contact to members of the same social 'bubble'. This article examines their moral decision-making and affective experiences of lockdown, especially when faced with competing responsibilities to adhere to public health regulations, but also to care for themselves or provide support to people outside their bubbles. Our respondents engaged in independent risk assessment, weighing up how best to uphold the 'spirit' of the lockdown even when contravening lockdown regulations; their decisions could, however, lead to acute social rifts. Some respondentssuch as those in flatshares and shared childcare arrangementsrecounted feeling disempowered from participating in the collective management of risk and responsibility within their bubbles, while essential workers found that anxieties about their workplace exposure to the coronavirus could prevent them from expanding their bubbles in ways they might have liked. The inability to adequately care for oneself or for others thus emerges as a crucial axis of disadvantage, specific to times of lockdown. Policy recommendations regarding lockdown regulations are provided.

Community healthcare workers’ experiences during and after COVID-19 lockdown: a qualitative study from Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Opportunities to expand bubbles at Level 3 of lockdown could, in principle, have provided relief. In practice, however, few respondents took up this option, either because they faced stigma from prospective bubblemates or themselves worried that they might be vectors of infection (see also Long et al, 2020; Long et al, forthcoming; Trnka et al, 2021). Such findings highlight how social distancing – often framed as an ethical endeavour undertaken to ease pressure on health systems and healthcare workers (Jackson et al, 2020; Marchesi, 2020) – can actually generate distinct pressures for certain groups of the latter.…”

Social relationships and activities following elimination of SARS-CoV-2: a qualitative cross-sectional study

“…Participants were also recruited from a database of contacts who had participated in the research team’s previous surveys on experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand – who were themselves recruited via advertising campaigns intended to maximise variation. 36 37 The survey was self-administered and thus unlikely to have been influenced by researcher characteristics. In total, the survey received 1040 valid responses.…”

“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: Proximity as an Ethical Problem during COVID-19

“…In focusing on the anthropology of ethics our aim is not to determine whether something is ethical, but rather how the very category of the ethical is made present (or absented) in discourses about contagion, its spread, and its containment. Our contributors' insights into these processes derive from ongoing fieldwork reshaped by lockdown (Levine and Manderson 2021;Rouse 2021;Strong 2021) and de novo projects, born from the pandemic (Trnka 2021;Wynn 2021). In each case, lockdowns and physical-distancing regulations have recast what is ethnographically possible, reconfiguring reliance on digital communications and social media sources, as well as on more traditional, physically distanced modes of participant observation, for example, walking ethnographies (Trnka 2021) and drive-by observation (Levine and Manderson 2021).…”

“…We take a specific interest in ethical self‐fashioning (Foucault 1988 ; Laidlaw 2002 ; Mahmood 2005 ; Zigon 2008 ; Faubion 2012 ) in terms of how it informs, and is informed by, (imagined, enacted, legislated) relations with “Others.” We are thus particularly concerned with conceptualizations of personal and collective responsibility, including how reciprocal, interpersonal responsibilities and dependencies are envisioned (Faubion 2001 ; Adam 2017 ), as well as enactments of larger‐scale exchanges and flows of obligation and acts of care between citizens, states, and corporations (Welker 2014 ; Trnka 2017 ). As Susanna Trnka and Catherine Trundle ( 2017 ) have argued, these three facets of responsibility (personal, interpersonal, citizen‐state) may interact to reinforce, bifurcate, disperse, or multiply one's sense of obligations and abilities to achieve them. For too long, state‐of‐emergency critiques have tended to portray citizens as ignorant or duped by state power, eliding their roles in envisioning and delineating crises and extending the powers of the state (exceptions include Honig 2009 ; Fassin 2012 ; Trnka 2020a , 2020b ).…”

“…Responses to the pandemic demonstrate novel ways of reckoning with matters of proximity (e.g., determining how, when, and to what extent to move out of another's way, what level of surveillance and coercion is appropriate, and who should undertake these). Moreover, individual and collective understandings of viral contagion, as well as governmental mandates, class divisions, racial and structural violence, and gender and sexual ideologies (Team and Manderson 2020;Wynn 2020) construct new axes of privilege (Long 2020; Napier 2020; Trnka et al 2021) in terms of who can define, enact, and enforce "appropriate" ethical conduct.…”