Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe?

Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various writings—spun from diverse situations and global locations—proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times.

A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.

1142234111
Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe?

Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various writings—spun from diverse situations and global locations—proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times.

A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.

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Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dispatches from Home and the Field during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Overview

This volume, written in a readable and enticing style, is based on a simple premise, which was to have several exceptional ethnographers write about their experiences in an evocative way in real time during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than an edited volume with dedicated chapters, this book thus offers a new format wherein authors write several, distinct dispatches, each short and compact, allowing each writer's perspectives and stories to grow, in tandem with the pandemic itself, over the course of the book. Leaving behind the trope of the lonely anthropologist, these authors come together to form a collective of ethnographers to ask important questions, such as: What does it mean to live and write amid an unfolding and unstoppable global health and economic crisis? What are the intensities of the everyday? How do the isolated find connection in the face of catastrophe?

Such first-person reflections touch on a plurality of themes brought on by the pandemic, forces and dynamics of pressing concern to many, such as contagion, safety, health inequalities, societal injustices, loss and separation, displacement, phantasmal imaginings and possibilities, the uncertain arts of calculating risk and protection, limits on movement and travel, and the biopolitical operations of sovereign powers. The various writings—spun from diverse situations and global locations—proceed within a temporal flow, starting in March 2020, with the first alerts and cases of viral infection, and then move on to various currents of caution, concern, infection, despair, hope, and connection that have unfolded since those early days. The writings then move into 2021, with events and moods associated with the global distribution of potentially effective vaccines and the promise and hope these immunizations bring. The written record of these multiform dispatches involves traces of a series of lives, as the authors of those lives tried to make do, and write, in trying times.

A timely ethnography of an event that has changed all our lives, this book is critical reading for students and researchers of medical anthropology, sociocultural anthropology, contemporary anthropological theory, and ethnographic writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9783031191954
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Publication date: 02/01/2024
Series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
Edition description: 1st ed. 2022
Pages: 191
Product dimensions: 5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Robert Desjarlais is Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, USA.

Sabina M. Perrino is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, USA.

Joshua Reno is Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, USA.

Nicholas Bartlett is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University, USA.

Aurora Donzelli is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College, USA, and the University of Bologna, Italy.

Margaux Fitoussi is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, USA.

Alexa Hagerty is Associate Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, UK, and a Senior Researcher in JUST AI network of the Ada Lovelace Institute, UK.

Rafadi Hakim is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago, USA.

Parthiban Muniandy is a faculty member of Sociology at Sarah Lawrence College, USA.

Emily Ng is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.


Table of Contents

Preface.- Part 1. First Wave.- Part 2. Second Wave.- Part 3. Images for the New Year.- Part 4. Calculations.- Postscript.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Eizadirad and Wane’s book is a powerfully insightful work of scholarship with impeccable attention to context, culture, and literary construction. This is a brilliant and provocative examination of oral traditions and practices.”

—Molefi Kete Asante, Professor, Department of Africology, Temple University, USA and author of The History of Africa

“Moving between the poetic, the auto/biographical and the praxis of storytelling, this book creates a cartography where the center of learning is no longer within the four walls that we call school but within folklore tales, idioms, and proverbs. Innovatively conceived and carefully articulated, the book engages us as readers, students, and educators in pedagogical ways that are yet to be fully understood. Here, language is turned into the landscape where folktales and identities are both formed and performed. For those who are interested in oral culture, proverbs, storytelling, and folklore tales, this is a must read.”

—Awad Ibrahim, Professor, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, Canada, and author of Black Immigrants in North America

“In this book, Eizadirad and Wane provide a gift. This important resource which contributors write about proverbs, sayings, and folktales serves for many as a reminder of roots or cultural heritage; and as the theories by which we have been able to frame our analyses and understandings of life histories, contexts, and observations. These resources have long been used and will continue to tell our counter-stories as evident in this timely contribution.”

—Carl E. James, Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora, York University, Canada, and author of Colour Matters: Essays on the Experiences, Education and Pursuits of Black Youth 

“This book comes to us at a critical time, when the need for untold stories and counter narratives are essential in educating for the future. Eizadirad and Wane reminds us through diverse narratives not only the importance of upholding oral traditions but exemplifying the power stories hold in education through reaffirming identities, cultural legacies, and future aspirations of learners.”

—Karen Murray, System Superintendent, Toronto District School Board, Equity, Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression and Early Years, Centre of Excellence for Black Student Achievement, Canada

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