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I would love to have the community that has come together around this project to collaborate on creating some resources that could be interesting to broader academic and non-academic communities. For example, it would be great to work together to create some timelines on the platform around various themes relevant to COVID-19, and to do critical readings toghether of key scientific or official documents using the annotation features.

Beyond creating the "products" themselves, I think we would get a lot out of exercise in terms of thinking together on these kinds of projects.

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

I’ve been thinking a bit with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “abject” status (the excess, to cast away, the throw away) which she pulls from Judith Butler and spaces of liminality. The subjective experience of an abject status intersects so harshly with systems of power, the economy, national policy, etc. So, thinking about spaces of abjection. Who occupies this space during this time? How is it changed? How is it being embodied?

Gonzales, Roberto G., and Leo R. Chavez. 2012. “‘Awakening to a Nightmare’: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States.” Current Anthropology 53 (3): 255–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/665414.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE: Disinterring the Body Politic.”Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 370–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206.

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

Gendered Spaces – We keep seeing these headlines over and over  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html) and I think there’s a lot more analysis that needs to happen here.. But women leaders = success in governance in these reports and I think we should complicated this more. What does this look like from the scale of the body to national political offices?

Failed governance - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

^ For many this is failure, but for others the ability to have militarized weapons in the state capitol is a success. So how do we blur the boundaries between success/failure?

In the US, many public intellectuals on the left have been discussing how this pandemic has challenged the seemingly inevitable dominance of neoliberal governing regimes and ideologies, and has expanded the conditions of possibility for social democratic or socialist ideas and policies. However, the imagined post-neoliberal era is no necessarily concieved of in the same way.

A couple of helpful examples include:

• In a widely shared video (2020), Naomi Klein draws on her previous work on disaster capitalism in the Shock Doctrine (2007) to argue not only that “Coronavirus Capitalism” must be resisted, but that there are many social democratic ideas “lying around” that are both crucial to responding to the current public health and economic crisis, and made possible because of the shock to the system. These ideas include the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, canceling student debt, guaranteeing paid sick leave, and providing permanent shelter to the unhoused.
  
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• Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote an article (2020) for Jacobin magazine that examined the pandemic through the lens of Marxist theory of crises, examining the mutation and transmission of the virus through neoliberal globalization’s production of nature, the failures of neoliberal healthcare systems to respond, and the crisis that the pandemic and its response pose to most forms of consumer capitalism. He contrasts the current COVID-19 economic crisis with the Great Recession, and argues, among other things, that:

…the burden of exiting from the current economic crisis now shifts to the United States and here is the ultimate irony: the only policies that will work, both economically and politically, are far more socialistic than anything that Bernie Sanders might propose and these rescue programs will have to be initiated under the aegis of Donald Trump, presumably under the mask of Making America Great Again.

All those Republicans who so viscerally opposed the 2008 bailout will have to eat crow or defy Donald Trump. The latter, if he is wise, will cancel the elections on an emergency basis and declare the origin of an imperial presidency to save capital and the world from “riot and revolution.”

At least in these articles, Klein is essentially issuing both a warning and an optimistic call to action while Harvey seems to be arguing neoliberalism’s incapacity to deal with this kind of crisis may lead to an embrace of at least some aspects of a “left-leaning” economic policy regime, but one that may well be represented and enacted through a nationalistic lens, likely at the expense of left movements, civil liberties, democratic participation, internationalism/transnationalism, marginalized populations, and migrants.

Harvey, David. 2020. “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19.” Jacobin, March 20, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-econo….

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Macmillan.

———. 2020. “Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It.” Online Video. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-capitalism/.

Finding a way to protest while observing social distancing, Never Again Action is organizing people in the US to protest in their cars in front of immigration detention centers. They are calling on state govenors to release all immigrant detainees in order to protect them from dangerous, crowded, and unsanitary conditions.

This image is a screenshot of one of their Facebook posts about an action at the Hudson County Detention Center in Kearny, New Jersey on March 22, 2020.

(As of 3/22/2020) The Sunnyside Greenmarket (42nd &, 43rd Ave, Sunnyside, NY) in Queens, NY remained opened, but instituted several measures to comply with social distancing including:

• Preventing customers from handling produce
• Chalking the sidewalk to keep customers in line six feet apart
• Many of the vendors were wearing gloves and/or masks
• Food scraps were no longer being collected

Local grocery stores, however, were not instituting these kinds of policies. Aside from changing hours, providing (I assume) employees with gloves and masks, and, in some cases, providing an hour during the early morning for elderly shoppers, the practice of shopping saw little change (except, of course, for shelves that were more bare than usual).

• I am situated in New York, NY (Queens), and am teaching anthropology at John Jay College (CUNY) & STS at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
• I have been involved in the Disaster Studies Network for some time, focusing on slow disaster, nuclear waste, and remediation. I'm interested in what forms of public and collaborative STS can be developed, particularly during times of crisis.
• I can be reached at delatorre.pedro@gmail.com
• I am especilly interested in the following questions:
• How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?
• How, in different settings, have dominant political regimes and ideologies shaped COVID-19 preparation and response?
• How is ‘social distancing’ practiced and interpreted in different COVID-19 settings?