Pandemic technologies
22 June 2022
The moral experience of life under lockdown: narratives from Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom
Nicholas J. Long
Social distancing measures and related forms of COVID-19 restriction present an innate challenge when it comes to moral experience. On the one hand, they are embedded within a public health rhetoric that posits compliance and ‘staying at home’ as the ‘right’ thing to do. On the other, they truncate pre-existing flows of support and care that are often central to people’s existential concerns and moral ‘ground projects’. This paper draws on research conducted in both Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom, giving an overview of some of the most common and most striking narratives surrounding moral experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows how COVID-19 restrictions frequently precipitated narratives of tricky moral dilemmas during lockdown and accounts of moral injury that impeded social recovery after restrictions were eased, but also allowed some people to experience novel forms of flourishing, to the extent that COVID was even spoken of as a ‘blessing’. The research shows the importance of developing and debating public health measures and messaging with reference to intersubjective moral concerns: an issue that has been subordinated to themes of the economy, biomedical health, and individual freedoms during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bio: Nicholas J. Long is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work on COVID-19 has been published in outlets including BMJ Global Health, Journal of Public Health, Medicine Anthropology Theory, Health and Social Care in the Community, Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and Policing and Society. Nick has also published extensively on the anthropology of Indonesia – with key contributions including his 2013 monograph Being Malay in Indonesia and the article ‘Suggestions of power: searching for efficacy in Indonesia’s hypnosis boom,’ which won the 2019 Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology.
Zoonotic Photography as an Interspecies Technology in COVID-19
Christos Lynteris
The question of the zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, present since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the question of anthrozoonosis, or the spillback of the virus from humans back to animals (and back to humans again) since 2021 have led to a proliferation of scientific papers, popular science articles, news items, and social media debates. Framing Covid-19 as a zoonotic disease has relied on a range of visual technologies, including maps, diagrams and photography. This paper will examine the photographic configuration of Covid-19 as a zoonotic disease, asking in which ways the employment of the medium relies on existing tropes of epidemic photography and in which it unsettles these and leads to new framings of the pandemic as an interspecies phenomenon. The paper will argue that scientists remain perilously unreflexive about their use of photography, ignoring the epistemological and political implications of the medium when applied to knowing and controlling zoonotic diseases.
Bio: Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He is the Principal Investigator of the Wellcome-funded project "The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis". He has authored and edited ten books on the anthropology and history of epidemics, the latest of which, Visual Plague: The Emergence of Epidemic Photography, will be appearing in 2022 with MIT Press.