If coronavirus is a game with all the countries as players who were dragged into it involuntarily, China seems to be the unpopular winner of the year (Spross 2021). Looking back at 2020, COVID-19 unleashed a global pandemic that swept…
Pandemic Affects, Planetary Specters, and the Precarious Everyday: Encountering COVID-19 as a Nomad with (Half)Grown Roots (#WitnessingCorona)
Pandemics are planetary specters that haunt our more-than-human world. The “specter” of planetary destruction in the Anthropocene remains “the event of our time” (Ruddick 2015, 1115). Calling the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) another planetary specter heightens the serious material nature…
The Militarisation of the COVID-19 Response in South Africa (#WitnessingCorona)
The imponderabilia of our COVID times As medical anthropologists well versed in the social grammar of infectious disease, the global spread of the coronavirus has pressed us to the edges of history. Writing from the centre, the ground keeps…
Mixed Messages: COVID-19, a Cartoon Heroine, and Violence Against Women in Mexico (#WitnessingCorona)
One of the gendered impacts of COVID-19 is the surge of violence against women and girls (VAWG) in many parts of the world as a result of lockdowns and stay-in-place orders (UN Women 2020). Using Mexico as a case…
When “Slow Violence” Collides with Visceral Hunger – COVID-19 and the Current and Future Food System of Cape Town, South Africa (#WitnessingCorona)
The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated both the unsustainability and the fragility of our current food system, across multiple scales. COVID-19 has proven to be the litmus test for the current industrialized food system, one that has, in certain circles,…
Future-making on Hold: Pandemic Audio Diaries from two Rift Valley Lakes in Kenya (#WitnessingCorona)
In this post, we share the accounts of our research partners from Lake Baringo and Lake Naivasha in the Kenyan Rift Valley on how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic impacts their lives and livelihoods. In mobile research with mobile people, mobile…