Introduction

This chapter continues themes of the previous chapters, around a politics of everyday life, including local action, domestic life, care and questions of austerity and the responsibilities and reach of the state. However, it places them within a different context, the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic, or more specifically the initial phases of the pandemic, March– September 2020. There are too many aspects of society which have been thrown into sharp relief by the crisis to consider here in much detail –questions of class, work and inequality, race and vulnerability, disability and much more besides (Rose-Redwood et al, 2020; Andrews et al, 2021). Social science will continue to make sense of the pandemic for decades to come, and so the discussion here can only be partial and provisional, especially given that it is still ongoing at the time of writing. In what follows I focus on the nature of local action during the early stages of the pandemic. What were the politics, ethics, affects and practices of care that emerged at this moment of immense strain on society? What infrastructural forms did these take? And what do they reveal about the possibilities and problematics of a localised politics of care?

If austerity as discussed in preceding chapters can be understood as ‘slow violence’ (Pain, 2019) or ‘crisis ordinary’ (Berlant, 2008; Brickell, 2020a), then the COVID-19 crisis was (and is, at the time of writing), a much more visible and immediate crisis, which has impacted on almost every sphere of human life and interaction in a dramatic way. The need to render it visible as a crisis itself is not an issue. However, while at the centre of the pandemic is a new medical and bodily set of problems, the wider social, political and economic problems caused, or rather interwoven with, this medical crisis are clearly not new nor caused directly by the virus. Rather they are being illuminated and intensified in new ways.

In this chapter I draw on some autoethnographic reflections as well as more conventional research methods. As discussed elsewhere (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021), I am interested in Puig de la Bellacasa (2017)'s idea of thinking with metaphors of ‘touch’, to consider the idea that the COVID-19 crisis has involved a kind of pressing down onto aspects of society, a pressure which enables us to see aspects that were already there more clearly.