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COVID time: Temporal imaginaries and pandemic materialities
Abstract
Since the advent of the COVID‐19 pandemic, several ways of understanding time have emerged: what we may call ‘COVID time’. Based on 40 qualitative online interviews in 2022 with Australians living across the continent, this article examines how people situated themselves and COVID‐19 in historical time. It further explores how material aspects, place and space (or “pandemic materialities”) factored into lived experiences and temporal imaginaries. We focus on how time‐related concepts such as synchronisation and the definition of crises and events are interrelated in the participants’ understandings of COVID as either over or a continuing crisis. The sociomaterial dimensions that served to alert people to risk and encourage them to engage in preventive action are identified as ways in which COVID time was experienced, remembered, understood and imagined. While some respondents claimed that the present moment was ‘post‐COVID’, for others, the pandemic was far from over in 2022 and indeed stretched into the future. We use a sociomaterial lens to show how respondents portray the ‘temporal technologies’ and ‘objectifications’ of the event of COVID‐19—the tangible materialisations of its temporal status as either relegated to the past or continuing as a mode of present and future crisis.
... Further it allows for a deeper understanding of the relations between short term enactments of crises to longer term institutionalized practices (cf. Butler and Lupton, 2025;Rhodes and Lancaster, 2023). Third, it makes the researcher aware of how temporal frames of actors influence decision-making . ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has foregrounded the significance of time to everyday life, as the routines, pace, and speed of social relations were widely reconfigured. This article uses rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change. We analyse the Mass Observation (MO) directive we co-commissioned on ‘COVID-19 and Time’, where volunteer writers reflect on whether and how time was made, experienced, and imagined differently during the early stages of the pandemic in the UK. We draw on Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier's ‘rhythmanalysis’, taking up their theorisation of rhythm as linear and cyclical and their concepts of arrhythmia (discordant rhythms) and eurhythmia (harmonious rhythms). Our analysis highlights how MO writers articulate (a) the ruptures to their everyday rhythms across time and space, (b) their experience of ‘blurred’ or ‘merged’ time as everyday rhythms are dissolved and the pace of time is intensified or slowed, and (c) the remaking of rhythms through new practices or devices and attunements to nature. We show how rhythm enables a consideration of the spatio-temporal textures of everyday life, including their unevenness, variation, and difference. The article thus contributes to and expands recent scholarship on the social life of time, rhythm and rhythmanalysis, everyday life, and MO.
Background
Burn-out is a long-standing problem among healthcare workers (HCWs) and leads to poorer quality and less safe patient care, lower patient satisfaction, absenteeism and reduced workforce retention. Crises such as the pandemic not only generate new challenges but also intensify existing workplace stresses and chronic workforce shortages. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the global health workforce is burnt-out and under immense pressure, with multiple individual, organisational and healthcare system drivers.
Method
In this article, we examine how key organisational and leadership approaches can facilitate mental health support for HCWs and identify strategies to support HCWs that are critical for supporting workforce well-being during the pandemic.
Results
We identified 12 key approaches at the organisational and individual levels for healthcare leadership to support workforce well-being during the COVID-19 crisis. These approaches may inform leadership responses to future crises.
Conclusion
Governments, healthcare organisations and leaders must invest and deliver long-term measures to value, support and retain the health workforce to preserve high-quality healthcare.
Introduction
The COVID-19 crisis has wrought major changes to people's lives across the globe since the beginning of the outbreak in early 2020. The "Australians' Experiences of COVID-19” qualitative descriptive study was established to explore how Australians from different geographical areas and social groups experienced the COVID-19 crisis.
Methods
Three sets of semi-structured interviews, each with a diverse group of 40 adults across Australia, were completed between 2020 and 2022. This article reports findings from the first set of interviews, conducted by telephone in mid-2020.
Results
The participants discussed their experiences of living through this period, which was characterized by strong public health measures to contain the spread of COVID, including a national lockdown and border closures. Interview fieldnotes and verbatim transcripts were used to conduct an interpretive thematic analysis. The analysis is structured around the following five themes covering the quotidian and affective aspects of participants' lives in the early months of the COVID crisis: “disruption to routines;” “habituating to preventive measures;” “social isolation and loneliness;” “changes to work and education;” and “little change to life.” A sixth theme concerns how participants responded to our question about what they imagined their lives would be like after the pandemic: “imagining post-COVID life.”
Discussion
The crisis affected participants' experience of daily life variously according to such factors as their social circumstances and obligations as well as their histories of illness, making visible some of the unequal social and economic effects of the pandemic across different genders, ages, localities and socioeconomic groups. Our participants fell into three roughly equal groups: (i) those who found the lockdown and associated restrictions very difficult; (ii) those who reported feeling barely affected by these conditions; and (iii) those who found benefits to the “slowing down” of life during this period.
How the COVID-19 pandemic, and the deaths that occurred during the acute phase of the pandemic (2020-2021), will be remembered is yet to be determined. Writing from a UK perspective, this short article reflects on the way in which memory, narratives and death are constructed, contested, and (re)produced. Drawing on the authors' respective sociological sub-fields, it makes a case for an ongoing sociological appraisal of emergent COVID-19 narratives, that can encompass and intertwine understandings of temporality, accountability and loss.
The COVID‐19 pandemic is characterised by more than mass viral spread. Interviews with young adults in the Australian island‐state of Tasmania narrate how COVID‐19 is shared socially, economically, and biologically, but not equally. During the time interviews were done, border policies separated Tasmania from mass infections experienced elsewhere, giving us an opportunity to understand how separation does not equate with a lack of socio‐material and emotional impact from the pandemic. Recognising spatially diverse impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic means becoming more reflexively aware of the structural inequalities informing how it has been experienced, particularly in the early period of the pandemic. We warn against exclusionary narratives of the pandemic that do not value impacts on those without high physical risk or exposure to the virus. Responding to such exclusionary narratives involves promoting a form of hope that is reflexive, self‐aware, and critical. We develop on these aims by reference to certain theme COVID‐19 as a syndemic, the temporal narrative of a boom–bust cycle, and COVID‐19 as a crisis in everyday life. The COVID‐19 pandemic is experienced not only in the hotspot and the hospital, but uniquely across everyday social, emotional, and spatial life. This article shares long quotes and themes from interviews with young adults aged 18 to 30 years in Australia’s island‐state of Tasmania and engages with hope and crisis. Young adults’ early pandemic experiences in Tasmania exemplify how COVID‐19 is shared socially, economically, and biologically, but unequally.
Based on longitudinal research conducted with 21 Mexican immigrants between 2018 and 2021, this article examines the challenges the COVID‐19 pandemic posed to undocumented immigrants in the United States attempting to provide care for aging parents in Mexico. As the United States excluded undocumented immigrants from pandemic support, the pandemic undermined their ability to provide health care for their parents even as the Mexican public health care system crumbled. Meanwhile, as the pandemic hastened their parents’ demise, it thwarted immigrants’ ability to time returns to see their parents before they died. While scholars have amply documented how spatial disparities exacerbated the impact of the pandemic among marginalized groups, few have examined the temporal disruptions caused by the pandemic. This article suggests that the pandemic provoked particular distress by desynchronizing the temporalities of family life across borders and preventing immigrants’ abilities to coordinate care for their parents in time. [COVID‐19, transnational families, eldercare, death, time]
Background
The aim of this study was to use indepth social research to better understand the relationships and intersections between understandings and practices of COVID-19 risk, immunity and vaccination in lay people’s accounts.
Methods
This article reports findings from a qualitative research project involving semi-structured telephone interviews with a diverse group of 40 adults from around Australia about their experiences of the COVID crisis, conducted in late 2021 during the Delta variant outbreak. The participants’ responses to questions about COVID risk, COVID vaccines and how they thought they could best protect their health were analysed using an inductive thematic approach.
Results
A notion of ‘communal risk’ was expressed together with ‘individual risk’. Relatedly, people’s understandings of what might be characterised as ‘communal immunity’ as well as individual immunity also dominated in their accounts. Both communal risk and communal immunity are influenced by a range of constantly changing and interrelated factors. Locale was a strong factor in shaping people’s experiences and stances related to COVID risk. The participants referred to aspects such as their community’s geographical location; the number of COVID cases and the level of COVID vaccination by others living in their state or territory; adoption of preventive measures; vaccine availability, scheduling and take-up; viral testing and tracing reporting; and the extent and timing of viral spread in the population. These factors were continually related back to highly specific conditions and practices in their community or state of residence.
Conclusions
Understandings and practices related to COVID risk, immunity and vaccination were based both on individual experiences and broader ideas about the role of community. Spatial contexts are influential but there is also a strong temporality to these understandings and practices. There is a fine balance to be maintained between individual-level protection from COVID risk and community-level actions.
Crisis is a conceptual tool for synchronizing different experiences of time. It is operative in notions of the Financial Crisis, the Crisis of Democracy, the Climate Crisis—and the Corona Crisis. This article explores that synchronization through an empirical inquiry into the different timescapes of the Corona Crisis. It builds empirically on 200 interviews with residents in Norra Botkyrka, which is located at the fringes of Sweden’s capital Stockholm. The thematic analysis shows how the respondents’ different time frames, time orders, tempos, and timings become synchronized through the crisis concept, but also how they invoke active and passive desynchronization. This temporal diversity points out the interplay between social differences and the various ways people are (de)synchronizing with the Corona Crisis.
In this study, we expand on the newly devised sociological concept of pandemic practices that emerged during the COVID-19 outbreak by applying it to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The analytical heuristic of pandemic practices distinguishes between four kinds of practices: (i) primary practices that encompass the public's direct response to the pandemic, (ii) responsive practices that encompass altered routines and social interactions, (iii) adaptive practices that encompass more elusive organisational and legal legacies and (iv) meta-practices that produce particular narratives about the pandemic dynamics that might lead to lasting socio-cultural behavioural changes. In this paper we probe further into the notion of meta-practices. The results show that the prolonged nature of the HIV/AIDS pandemic combined with the widespread stigmatisation of vulnerable groups has led to distinct social practices that fragment along socio-economic lines both internally in countries but also between high-income and low-income countries. As the COVID-19 pandemic becomes increasingly endemic, lessons learned from HIV/AIDS expose the dangers of similar fragmentations where parts of the population return to normal but where many others continue to suffer not only from adverse health outcomes but also social exclusion and stigmatisation. Thus, we argue that attention to pandemic practices, and how they produce and reinforce underlying socio-economic vulnerabilities would strengthen long-term pandemic responses.
Following the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 across the world in 2020, millions of people were reduced in their mobility to hinder the spread of the disease. The lockdown was particularly difficult for older adults, who were deemed ‘vulnerable’ because many felt unsafe leaving the house and often forced to self-isolate. In this paper, we interpret the lockdowns as a period of prolonged stillness: breaks from everyday practices, including withdrawnness, inefficiency, and retreat. We extend ideas of stillness by integrating the capability approach, which shows how the opportunities and challenges that arise from moments of stillness are dependent on a combination of individual agency and the role of structural or contextual factors. Using the accounts of thirty-eight older adults in the Netherlands and England, we show how the COVID-19 lockdowns established and encouraged different types of stillness which had differing impacts upon the older adults’ lives. The effect of the prolonged stillness on these different areas of everyday life is based on individual agency and contextual factors, such as choosing to volunteer or having an adequate internet connection. Thus, our findings contribute to discussions around active ageing and demonstrate that slowing down, and spending more time at home, can provide respite from an otherwise active everyday life.
This national study investigated the positives reported by residents experiencing the large-scale public health measures instituted in Australia to manage the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Most Australians had not previously experienced the traditional public health measures used (social distancing, hand hygiene and restriction of movement) and which could potentially impact negatively on mental well-being. The research design included qualitative semi-structured phone interviews where participants described their early pandemic experiences. Data analysis used a rapid identification of themes technique, well-suited to large-scale qualitative research. The ninety participants (mean age 48 years; 70 women) were distributed nationally. Analysis revealed five themes linked with mental well-being and the concept of silver linings: safety and security, gratitude and appreciation, social cohesion and connections, and opportunities to reset priorities and resilience. Participants demonstrated support for the public health measures and evidence of individual and community resilience. They were cognisant of positives despite personal curtailment and negative impacts of public health directives. Stories of hope, strength, and acceptance, innovative connections with others and focusing on priorities and opportunities within the hardship were important strategies that others could use in managing adversity.
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.
The multiple nature of time has by now been well established across a wide range of scholarly traditions in the humanities and social sciences. The article takes that insight as a starting point, in order to discuss the tools, work, sites and contestations involved in common temporal frameworks and structures that cross and join together time’s multiplicities. We thus articulate and discuss key components of synchronisation, a concept with significant potential for understanding common temporalities and social orders. Our emphasis is particularly on media, their technological and representational affordances for synchronisation. The article’s approach to social and mediated times presents an alternative to Hartmut Rosa and François Hartog’s influential theories about the temporal configuration of the present historical moment. Their understanding of the present tends more towards unity and uniformity, particularly by means of chronology. We follow Luhmann in arguing that ‘there is no supersynchronization’ producing such privileged, unitary temporal orders. We propose pursuing an understanding of both present and past through investigations of synchronisation itself, which always exists in plural, always involves different synchronisations in competition with each other, is subject to social and historical contingencies. The article combines theoretical and conceptual arguments with historical and contemporary cases. We investigate the synchronisation of national collectives by means of broadcast media, of individuals in everyday life by means of social media, and the recalibration of various contemporary media to a global scale in order to tackle the issue of climate change. These cases move from past and relatively comprehensive forms of synchronisation, via more localised forms today, to highly uncertain and heterogeneous ones in the future.
As COVID‐19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that they do not end suddenly; indeed, only rarely do the diseases in question actually end. This article examines the ways in which scholars have identified and described the end stages of previous epidemics, pointing out that significantly less attention has been paid to these periods than to origins and climaxes. Analysis of the ends of epidemics illustrates that epidemics are as much social, political, and economic events as they are biological; the “end,” therefore, is as much a process of social and political negotiation as it is biomedical. Equally important, epidemics end at different times for different groups, both within one society and across regions. Multidisciplinary research into how epidemics end reveals how the end of an epidemic shifts according to perspective, whether temporal, geographic, or methodological. A multidisciplinary analysis of how epidemics end suggests that epidemics should therefore be framed not as linear narratives—from outbreak to intervention to termination—but within cycles of disease and with a multiplicity of endings. Open access at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1600-0498.12370
This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.
The present study uses a qualitative approach to understand the impact of COVID-19 on family life. Australian parents of children aged 0–18 years were recruited via social media between April 8 and April 28, 2020, when Australians were experiencing social distancing/isolation measures for the first time. As part of a larger survey, participants were asked to respond via an open-ended question about how COVID-19 had impacted their family. A total of 2,130 parents were included and represented a diverse range of family backgrounds. Inductive template thematic analysis was used to understand patterns of meaning across the texts. Six themes were derived from the data, including “Boredom, depression and suicide: A spectrum of emotion,” “Families are missing the things that keep them healthy,” “Changing family relationships: The push pull of intimacy,” “The unprecedented demands of parenthood,” “The unequal burden of COVID-19,” and “Holding on to positivity.” Overall, the findings demonstrated a breadth of responses. Messages around loss and challenge were predominant, with many families reporting mental health difficulties and strained family relationships. However, not all families were negatively impacted by the restrictions, with some families reporting positive benefits and meaning, including opportunities for strengthening relationships, finding new hobbies, and developing positive characteristics such as appreciation, gratitude, and tolerance.
Background: This study examines the global media framing of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to understand the dominant frames and how choice of words compares in the media. Periods of health crisis such as the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic add to the enormous burden of the media in keeping people constantly informed. Extant literature suggests that when a message is released through the media, what matters most is not what is said but how it is said. As such, the media could either mitigate or accentuate the crisis depending on the major frames adopted for the coverage. Methods: The study utilises content analysis. Data were sourced from LexisNexis database and two websites that yielded 6145 items used for the analysis. Nine predetermined frames were used for the coding. Results: Human Interest and fear/scaremongering frames dominated the global media coverage of the pandemic. We align our finding with the constructionist frame perspective which assumes that the media as information processor creates 'interpretative packages' in order to both reflect and add to the 'issue culture' because frames that paradigmatically dominate event coverage also dominate audience response. The language of the coverage of COVID-19 combines gloom, hope, precaution and frustration at varied proportions. Conclusion: We conclude that global media coverage of COVID-19 was high, but the framing lacks coherence and sufficient self-efficacy and this can be associated with media's obsession for breaking news. The preponderance of these frames not only shapes public perception and attitudes towards the pandemic but also risks causing more problems for those with existing health conditions due to fear or panic attack.
COVID‐19 and the associated lockdowns meant many working parents were faced with doing paid work and family care at home simultaneously. To investigate how they managed, this article draws a subsample of parents in dual‐earner couples (n = 1536) from a national survey of 2722 Australian men and women conducted during lockdown in May 2020. It asked how much time respondents spent in paid and unpaid labour, including both active and supervisory care, and about their satisfaction with work–family balance and how their partner shared the load. Overall, paid work time was slightly lower and unpaid work time was very much higher during lockdown than before it. These time changes were most for mothers, but gender gaps somewhat narrowed because the relative increase in childcare was higher for fathers. More mothers than fathers were dissatisfied with their work–family balance and partner’s share before COVID‐19. For some the pandemic improved satisfaction levels, but for most they became worse. Again, some gender differences narrowed, mainly because more fathers also felt negatively during lockdown than they had before.
Long COVID represents the constellation of post-acute and long-term health effects caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection; it is a complex, multisystem disorder that can affect nearly every organ system and can be severely disabling. The cumulative global incidence of long COVID is around 400 million individuals, which is estimated to have an annual economic impact of approximately $1 trillion-equivalent to about 1% of the global economy. Several mechanistic pathways are implicated in long COVID, including viral persistence, immune dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, complement dysregulation, endothelial inflammation and microbiome dysbiosis. Long COVID can have devastating impacts on individual lives and, due to its complexity and prevalence, it also has major ramifications for health systems and economies, even threatening progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Addressing the challenge of long COVID requires an ambitious and coordinated-but so far absent-global research and policy response strategy. In this interdisciplinary review, we provide a synthesis of the state of scientific evidence on long COVID, assess the impacts of long COVID on human health, health systems, the economy and global health metrics, and provide a forward-looking research and policy roadmap.
This article analyses practices of pandemic time making that surrounded the imposition and communication of laws restricting daily life in parts of the United Kingdom in spring 2020. With colleagues, we commissioned a Mass Observation Project directive in summer 2020, asking contributors about their everyday experience of time during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We analyse how legal temporalities emerge across 228 responses. Initially, law making seemed belated, missing the disruptive temporalities of the pandemic. Once they arrived, pandemic rules were sudden, changeable, and confusing. Mass Observation writers forged clusters of improvised practices – tactics of anticipation – to cope with these unsettling temporalities. Meanwhile, the Hansard Society, the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments, and legal commentators argued that ‘fast‐track’ pandemic law making was error ridden, putting the public at risk of unwitting criminal liability. Attentive to ‘polyrhythmic’ temporalities operating across fields of experience and action, our study underlines the contradictory qualities of apparently resonant constructions of legal time.
In this paper we explore the impact of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic on the governance of healthcare in the Netherlands. In doing so, we re-examine the idea that a crisis necessarily leads to processes of transition and change by focusing on crisis as a specific language of organizing collective action instead. Framing a situation as a crisis of a particular kind allows for specific problem definitions, concurrent solutions and the inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders. Using this perspective, we examine the dynamics and institutional tensions involved in governing healthcare during the pandemic. We make use of multi-sited ethnographic research into the Dutch healthcare crisis organization as it responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on decision-making at the regional level. We tracked our participants through successive waves of the pandemic between March 2020 and August 2021 and identified three dominant framings of the pandemic-as-crisis: a crisis of scarcity, a crisis of postponed care and a crisis of acute care coordination. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these framings in terms of the institutional tensions that arose in governing healthcare during the pandemic: between centralized, top-down crisis management and local, bottom-up work; between informal and formal work; and between existing institutional logics.
The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped life for all in countless ways. For young people, the pandemic accelerated the digitalization of school education and upended relations with peers, parents, and society as a whole. In this paper, we look beyond these immediate effects to explore how pandemic experiences, feelings, and thoughts suggest profound shifts in young people’s perspectives on and orientations towards the future. Our research comprises parallel qualitative research with young people aged 15–19 in Denmark and Australia. Drawing on a posthumanist account of the world as entanglements of multiple human and non-human agencies and inspired by Donna Haraway’s admonition to stay with the trouble of the world, we discuss how species meet as the coronavirus makes kin with the young people and how the young people’s perspectives on the future become with the pandemic. That is, what intimations of worldings and reworldings can be glimpsed as young people shared their changed perspectives on priorities related to the meaning of life and the sustainability of the (more-than-) human condition from the midst of the pandemic.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 globally, a range of vaccines has been developed and delivered to reduce viral transmission and prevent COVID cases. This article reports findings from a qualitative research project involving telephone interviews with a diverse group of 40 adult Australians about their experiences of the COVID crisis. Interviews were conducted in late 2021 when Australians were dealing with the Delta variant outbreak and following a major effort on the part of government authorities to improve COVID-19 vaccination supplies and take-up. Responses to a question about COVID vaccines revealed that attitudes to and acceptance of COVID vaccines among this group were overwhelmingly positive. All participants had received at least one vaccine dose and the majority expressed views in support of mass vaccination against COVID. People who were hesitant or cautious about accepting COVID vaccination referred to the vaccines’ novelty and potential side effects. While many people were aware of debates about vaccine safety in the news media, trust in science and medical advice about COVID vaccines was strong. Participants wanted to protect themselves and others by accepting the recommended doses. Participants’ locale was a major factor in shaping experiences and stances on vaccines. The setting of government targets and mandates for vaccination was a key motivating factor. The goal of ‘getting back to normal’ was expressed as another reason for accepting vaccination, particularly for those living in areas that had been badly affected by high COVID cases and prolonged lockdowns.
The COVID-19 pandemic has largely been made sense of as a crisis . However, using crisis as a temporal-analytical category arguably obscures the complexity of the different temporalities at work in the pandemic. In this article, we examine how the pandemic outbreak led to numerous acts of synchronisation and de-synchronisation—between humans and viruses, between social groups and even between historical ages. In order to make sense of the temporal consequences of an epidemic, we introduce the concept of ‘temporal technologies’, understood as a set of procedures that control, regulate, produce and assemble time in relational networks of both human and non-human actors. This article thus attempts to create a framework for understanding the epidemic experience in temporal terms by using ‘temporal technologies’ as an analytical tool.
Public health and media discourses have often portrayed older adults as a vulnerable group during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, some emerging research is showing that older adults are faring better in terms of their mental health when compared to their younger counterparts. Understanding older adults' mental well-being during the pandemic requires in-depth exploration of the different place-based resources and systems around them. In particular, rural older adults face distinct challenges and opportunities related to accessing valued resources to promote their well-being. Drawing together research on aging and multi-systemic resilience, we explored what strategies, resources, and processes rural older adults valued in the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. A series of 51 semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted from May to August 2020 with 26 rural older adults in Manitoba, Canada. Despite adversities, participants drew on and developed resources at the individual, local, community, institutional, and societal level to support their well-being. Specifically, they identified individual strategies (e.g., positivity, acceptance, and gratitude), resources in their immediate environments (e.g., opportunities to keep busy, connect with friends, family and neighbours, and outdoor visits), and community organizations that contributed to their well-being. They also identified broader systems that shaped their resilience processes, such as access to health services, opportunities to volunteer and support others, media stories, reliable information, and public health policies and practices that value older adult lives. Importantly, some resources were less accessible to some participants, highlighting the need to develop strategies that address inequitable resources at different levels. By describing rural older adults' resilience we seek to advance the growing body of research in relation to social ecological resilience that moves beyond a focus on individual characteristics to include understanding of the role of material, social, and cultural contexts.
Since the start of the covid-19 pandemic, in the UK and elsewhere, the phrase “living with covid”—and variations such as “live with it,” “learning to live with the virus”—has circulated in public discourse. It refers to, and summarises, increasingly polarised positions with regards to the pandemic: on the one hand, accept the virus and resist adaptations; on the other, adopt mitigations and adapt to a new normal. Since the same phrase is used by different parties with diverse stakes and interests, it is emblematic of the way pandemic discourse has dichotomized over the past two years.
People living with pre-existing illnesses were identified as one of the groups most at risk when COVID-19 erupted. In this article, using the method of case studies developed from interviews, we explore how Australians in this category considered their risk and responded to it as they were learning about COVID-19 and living with restrictions and lockdown conditions in the early months of the pandemic. Building on the literature on assemblages of health and illness, therapeutic landscapes and the materialities of care, our analysis considers sociomaterialities of health, risk and care described in six featured case studies. Each person recounted a unique narrative that described the coming together of several different human and nonhuman agents in their experiences. Yet a number of overarching and intersecting themes can also be traced across the participants’ narratives: the vital contributions of lay care and self-care as part of the materialities of care, health and wellbeing; the role played by social networks, both online and in-person, for people in learning about and coping with COVID-19 and its potential risks; previous embodied and affective experiences of illness, vulnerability and care; and the role played by place and space in generating either therapeutic or distressing affective atmospheres. These findings have implications for better understandings of the situated sociomaterial contexts of how embodied experience, affective forces and encounters and relationships with other people and with things, place and space come together in crises such as COVID-19.
In this article, we use the case study method to detail the experiences of five participants who reported living with pre-existing mental illness during COVID-19. We adopted a sociomaterial analytical approach, seeking to identify how human and nonhuman agents came together to generate states of wellbeing or distress during this challenging period. As the case studies show, feelings of anxiety, fear and risk were generated from the following sociomaterial conditions: loss of face-to-face contact with friends and family members; concerns about hygiene and infecting others; financial stress; loss of regular paid employment or volunteering work; public spaces; and the behaviour of unknown others in public spaces. The agents and practices that emerged as most important for opening capacities for coping and maintaining wellness during lockdown included: the space of the home; contact with a small number of intimate others; online therapeutic care; practising self-care skills learnt from previous difficult times; helping and supporting others; engaging in leisure activities; and the companionship of pets. Contributing to an affirmative approach to more-than-human assemblages of health, distress and recovery, these findings demonstrate what bodies can do in times of crisis and the agents and practices that can generate capacities for coping.
Concepts and practices related to risk are central to people’s experiences of the COVID-19 crisis and attempts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. Sociological perspectives and empirical research on risk and uncertainty have much to offer for insights into how people conceptualise and respond to health risks such those associated with this new pandemic: including identification of the geographical, political, socioeconomic and other contextual dimensions. In this article, we provide findings from a qualitative interview-based project on Australians’ experiences of the first six months of the pandemic in 2020, including the national lockdown. A total of 40 adults from across Australia took part in a semi-structured telephone interview. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we explored people’s biographical, embodied, spatial and affective experiences in what we term their ‘COVID-19 risk narratives’. We further identified the events and circumstances that contributed to people beginning to feel at heightened personal risk from COVID-19 or which helped them feel safe or less vulnerable. The findings highlight the roles of factors including media coverage, previous experiences with infectious disease, beliefs about personal health and immunity, the government’s implementation of containment measures, observations of others’ behaviours and experiences, interactions with healthcare providers, geographical location and concern for family members. We argue that surfacing the interplay of these dynamic complex and highly contextual forces and relationships is vital to understanding COVID-19 risk understandings and practices.
Australia suffered two waves of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in 2020: the first lasting from February to July 2020 was mainly caused by transmission from international arrivals, the second lasting from July to November was caused by breaches of hotel quarantine which allowed spreading into the community. From a second wave peak in early August of over 700 new cases a day, by November 2020 Australia had effectively eliminated community transmission. Effective elimination was largely maintained in the first half of 2021 using snap lockdowns, while a slow vaccination programme left Australia lagging behind comparable countries. This paper describes the interventions which led to Australia's relative success up to July 2021, and also some of the failures along the way.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic can cause reverse zoonoses (i.e., human-animal transmission of COVID-19). It is vital to utilize up-to-date methods to improve the control, management, and prevention of reverse zoonoses. Awareness of reverse zoonoses should be raised at both individual and regional/national levels for better protection of both humans and animals.
Beck identified delocalisation, uncalculability and non-compensability as three characteristics of modern risk, the recognition of which lies at the core of transforming insubstantial risks into urgent catastrophes. This study aimed to empirically test and enrich Beck’s theory by examining how the Chinese media framed COVID-19 during the first month of the pandemic’s outbreak, a critical period for the media’s staging of risk. We observed that the usage of the consequences and treatment responsibility frames lies at the core of transforming COVID-19 from a risk to a catastrophe. Initially, journalists framed the virus as conquerable at a local level, with calculable consequences and compensable solutions. In the second phase, after the central government and national health experts stepped in, journalists admitted that COVID-19 was uncontrollable at a local level, starting to transform the risk into a national catastrophe, and called for enhanced solutions to controlling the spread of the virus. In the third phase, journalists started to transform the local catastrophe into a global crisis, referring to the global community as an information source. By building a bridge between risk theory and framing theory, we found that, in the case of COVID-19, delocalisation, incalculability, and non-compensability were crucial factors in risk virtualisation. We argue that the different usage of the consequences and treatment responsibility frames can either prevent the transformation of a risk into a catastrophe or facilitate this transformation process.
In this article we explore preliminary findings from the study COVIDSafe and Beyond: Perceptions and Practices conducted in Australia in 2020. The study involved a survey followed by interviews, and aimed to capture the dynamic ways in which members of the Australian public perceive the impact of Covid practices – especially public health measures like the introduction of physical and social distancing, compulsory mask wearing, and contact tracing. In the rescripting of public space, different notions of formal and informal surveillance, along with different textures of mediated and social care, appeared. In this article, we explore perceptions around divergent forms of surveillance across social, technological, governmental modes, and the relationship of surveillance to care in our media and cultural practices. What does it mean to care for self and others during a pandemic? How does care get enacted in, and through, media interfaces and public interaction?
The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare societal discourses regarding age differences and stereotypes. Using sociological approaches to risk and drawing on some examples from the Australian online news media, we illustrate how risk management approaches and risk uncertainties in response to the coronavirus, have homogenised younger and older peoples, and widely positioned them in a binary generational conflict of ‘risky’ and ‘at risk’. Younger people are frequently framed as healthy, active agents: they are engaging in risky behaviours that endanger their health and that of others. In contrast, older people have been typically cast as passive and at risk: ‘the elderly’ and ‘the vulnerable elderly’. In extreme cases, older people have also been framed as burdensome and worthless. In this chapter, we examine how age was framed or ‘staged’ during COVID-19 to illustrate how ageist language and dichotomous pandemic framings - grounded on blame and shame - add to social divisions and ‘othering’, shape risk management strategies, and cloud public health messaging on risk, viral spread, and physical distancing measures. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis.
This paper examines the temporal politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that despite the emphasis on digital real-time coverage and epidemiological forecasting, the pandemic has been understood as a historical event, even as it has been unfolding. The paper considers the implications of this ambiguous temporality, suggesting that COVID-19 has made visible a new heterotemporality, wherein real time, history, and the future intermesh. The paper concludes by focusing on Hong Kong, a former British colony and Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China since 1997, showing how the pandemic has become an uncanny rendering of the city’s uncertain future.
‘Materialities of care’ is outlined as a heuristic device for making visible the mundane and often unnoticed aspects of material culture within health and social care contexts, and exploring interrelations between materials and care in practice. Three analytic strands inherent to the concept are delineated: spatialities of care, temporalities of care and practices of care. These interconnecting themes span the papers in this special issue. The papers explore material practice across a range of clinical and non-clinical spaces, including hospitals, hospices, care homes, museums, domestic spaces, and community spaces such as shops and tenement stairwells. The collection addresses fleeting moments of care, as well as choreographed routines that order bodies and materials. Throughout there is a focus on practice, and relations between materials and care as ongoing, emergent and processual. We conclude by reflecting on methodological approaches for examining materialities of care, and offer some thoughts as to how this analytic approach might be applied to future research within the sociology of health and illness.
They should be commemorated': Health experts call for a COVID-19 memorial
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