Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: A visual essay

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis has generated an intensity of feeling globally, as people’s everyday spatial and embodied practices have been continually disrupted and fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. In this visual essay, I present and engage with smartphone photographs of public spaces in the Australian cities of Canberra and Sydney that I have accumulated as a ‘COVID Life’ archive. The photographs record my everyday experiences in and through spaces I inhabited and through which I moved. I have selected some of the images and provide a reflective analysis that draws on the concept of affective atmospheres to consider the sociomaterialities and spatialities evident in the images. I describe how the assemblages of people, things, place and space featured in these images generated a range of thoughts and feelings: both in the moment of capturing the images and in reviewing them at a later time as part of an archive of COVID memorialisation.

Pandemic surveillance and mobilities across Sydney, New South Wales

“…COVID‐19 enrolled many citizens into systems of sensory power for the first time, deepened the enrolment of others, and pressured citizens who refused or sought to bypass certain components by limiting their mobilities and access to public and quasi‐public space (Akbari, 2021). As Lupton (2022, p. 42) points out, usual “habits of moving and emplacing our bodies in relation to others’ bodies and to things were transformed.” For a time, it seemed that the ways bodies move between and dwell in space would be changed forever.…”

Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty

“…Since the advent of the COVID-19 crisis, scholarship using creative and arts-based methods such as visualisations created from indepth interviews (Lewis et al 2023), imaginative literature (Howell 2022), graphic narratives (Boileau and Johnson 2020;Venkatesan and Joshi 2022), diary writing (Gammel and Wang 2022) and photographic documentation of signs and outdoor spaces (Lupton 2022;Mosteanu 2021) have vividly portrayed the socio-spatialities, affective forces, multisensory dimensions and materialities of everyday life during the pandemic. In this article, we adopt an approach bringing together autoethnographic, dialogic and poetic inquiry to witness the suffering and document feelings of liminality, uncertainty and moral distress caused by COVID-19 from the perspective of a mother/carer.…”

Advancing Inclusive Playful Learning Practices: Critical Examination of Affective and Embodied Dynamics in Artful Educational Practices as Catalysts for Playful Learning

“…This approach acknowledges the profound impact of affect on researchers and our embodied capacity to affect and be affected by our surroundings (ibid., p. 744). Photographs serve as crucial elements, recording local arrangements of people, other living beings, spaces, and places, capturing the photographer's motivations in the moment and emotional state during the research (Lupton, 2022). These images are not just visual aids; they are mediums through which I attune to and materialize the atmospheres and emotions present in the research setting.…”

“…To protect participants privacy while maintaining the affective quality of the images, I have chosen to apply filters. This technique ensures confidentiality, positions the photographs as central components within the complex web of human and non-human relations in the research, recognizes their value as memory objects and tools for reflective analysis (Kindon, 2003;Lupton, 2022). The filtered imagery emphasizes the material performance of the photographs, extending beyond visual representation to become objects that evoke affects (Lupton, 2022).…”

“…This technique ensures confidentiality, positions the photographs as central components within the complex web of human and non-human relations in the research, recognizes their value as memory objects and tools for reflective analysis (Kindon, 2003;Lupton, 2022). The filtered imagery emphasizes the material performance of the photographs, extending beyond visual representation to become objects that evoke affects (Lupton, 2022). This methodological choice enhances the affective style of academic writing (Gherardi, 2019).…”