The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID‐19

Abstract

The ongoing COVID‐19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post‐event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as racism, poverty, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which inflect how the pandemic is known and governed as an emergency. In this article, we reflect on COVID‐19 responses in two settler colonial societies—Australia and the United States—to consider how distinct styles of pandemic responses in each context resonate and dissonate across the racially uneven distribution of futurity that structures liberal order. In each case, the event of COVID‐19 has indeed opened a window that reveals multiple slow emergencies; yet in these and other responses this revelation is not leading to meaningful changes to address underlying forms of structural violence. In Australia and the United States, we see how specific slow emergencies—human‐induced climate change and anti‐Black violence in White supremacist societies, respectively—become intensified as liberal order recalibrates itself in response to the event of COVID‐19.

COVID‐19: A systems perspective on opportunities for better health outcomes

“…Unless such efforts for change are taken, poor health outcomes and health inequities are likely to be exacerbated in the longer term. Grove et al (2021) would describe the prevalence of NCDs as a slow emergency: NCDs develop over relatively long periods of time, and their impacts on the health system are gradual but significant. Unlike NCDs, COVID-19 spreads quickly and easily from person to person and has the potential to overwhelm health systems when not effectively contained.…”

Humanitarian inversions:COVID‐19 as crisis

“…As Ben Anderson asserts, moments of crisis or emergency ‘fold the future into the present’ (Anderson, 2017, p. 466) by calling for intervention to mitigate the consequences of unfolding events. But, COVID‐19 ‘strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed' (Grove et al, 2022, p. 1). The emergency imaginary typically assumes that intervention is undertaken in ‘an effort to ensure the continuity of the future’ (2022, p. 8) principally because outcomes remain uncertain and emergent and can be stabilised through action.…”

Beyond Green: Human–environment geographies for the ‘new’ century

“…When pandemics are added to the intersecting crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, we are indebted to those geographers who have had the wherewithal to help us make sense of these (Grove et al, 2021; Sultana, 2021). If there is great potential going beyond White environmental imaginaries to deal creatively with a future that will be messy and unstable (Instone and Taylor, 2016), we also need to be alert to risks.…”