Exploring the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on people's relationships with gardens
Gardens are places where science and art combine to create environments that often offer restorative and therapeutic experience to those who encounter them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, in the UK and elsewhere there has been a surge of interest in gardening. Public appreciation of gardens and other green spaces has grown and inequality of access to gardens and outdoor spaces has been extensively documented. Gardens are prevalent and of cultural significance in the UK, where their salutary properties have been documented for centuries. Yet people's relationships with gardens during the pandemic have been relatively underexplored in academia and were already under-researched prior to the pandemic's inception. This qualitative study investigates the relationships between people and gardens during the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, through thematic analysis based on in-depth interviews with 12 participants, it explores the effects that the pandemic had on people's relationships with gardens during an approximately 9-month period after the first national lockdown began in the UK. It places emphasis on health and wellbeing and garden design, using the concepts of agency and affordances as lenses through which to explore people's relationships with gardens. The results of this paper support others which have found people to be more supportive of nature-friendly garden design and to feel more connected with nature since the pandemic began.
A life without a plan? Freelance musicians in pandemic limbo
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already precarious conditions of freelance workers. The aim of this study is to understand what it means for freelance musicians to be in pandemic limbo. Thirteen Swedish professional freelance musicians in the classical genre were interviewed about their experiences in the midst of the pandemic. A theoretical frame of reference is offered with concepts from Bourdieu, sociology of emotions and emotional geographies. This enables an understanding of what it means as a freelancer to be dislocated and disrupted in relation to places and spaces of work and investments in time and emotions. The conclusions are about the ambivalent emotions and processes of emotional management that are caused by the pandemic. For freelance musicians, depending on their access to the live-settings of gigs, auditions and social venues, it is like being thrown back in time and place (back to where careers were slowly built). However, while at a distance from the normal run of careers, constructive processes of critical reflection and re-orientation have been initiated.
Tracing memories and meanings of festival landscapes during the COVID-19 pandemic
COVID-19 has deeply affected mass gatherings and travel and, in the process, has transformed festivals, festival landscapes, and people's sense of place in relation to such events. In this article we argue that it is important to better understand how people's memories of festival landscapes are affected by these larger shifts. We worked from the premise that information-rich cases could provide some initial insights in this respect. To that end, we interviewed seven individuals who are regular and longstanding in their engagement with festivals in one place, lutruwita/Tasmania, the island state of Australia. Key findings suggest that pandemic experiences mediate the range of meanings participants give to festival landscapes and their interpretations of such landscapes can be described as attachments and detachments, encounters, and reorientations. We conclude by proposing that participants' efforts to draw on memories, reflect on emotional geographies, and recast autobiographies help them adjust to crises, rethink their ways of moving to and from festival sites, and reframe their sense of place in relation to significant cultural events. Such insights have application beyond both the island state and the participants involved.
Neoliberal and pandemic subjectivation processes: Clapping and singing as affective (re)actions during the Covid-19 home confinement
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the restriction of free movement and the sheltering-in-place became worldwide strategies to manage the virus spread. Especially at the beginning of the pandemic, community-based affective events helped people feel less isolated and support each other. In this manuscript, we explore how two of these social practices-clapping and singing-were useful to counter the emotions entailed in the subjectivation processes that accompanied the pandemic. We then argue that, seen as affective happenings, singing and clapping heightened emotions and affects that were already implicit in neoliberalism, mainly anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of precariousness, disposability, and inadequacy. On one hand, singing and clapping were liberatory practices of solidarity and resistance against the changes induced by the pandemic and its biopolitics. On the other hand, they contributed to the primary narratives on social resilience, docile bodies, and biopolitics that informed the crisis management. Singing and clapping also operated as neoliberal technologies of the self by bringing the focus on individual agency, behavioral control, and the sacrifice of specific subjects (e.g., the healthcare workers described as heroes). In short, singing and clapping were affective happenings that instantiated an entanglement of subjectivation practices in which the power to affect and the power to resist coincided.
Coping with COVID-19: The sociomaterial dimensions of living with pre-existing mental illness during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis
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.
When work came home: Formation of feeling rules in the context of a pandemic
The shift of middle-class jobs to home settings, which occurred as a result of COVID-19 health measures that also closed schools and daycares, introduced dynamic changes to everyday life. We investigate these changes drawing on data from our study in which participants in Nova Scotia, Canada, who were working at home due to the pandemic, wrote journal entries in response to weekly prompts. Participants not only documented changes to their routines and challenges of managing work and parenting simultaneously and in the same physical space, but also reflected on their conflicted emotions about life during the pandemic and their vision for life as things return to "normal." Their narratives prompt us to consider these experiences and emotions in relation to Arlie Hochschild's scholarship on feeling rules, emotion work, and gender and work more broadly. We find that from our participants' struggle to meet existing expectations on activities and emotion while simultaneously managing new sets of protocols and feeling rules what emerges is a resistance to norms of busyness, productivity, and exhaustion.
Overseas Filipino workers and the COVID-19 pandemic: Exploring the emotional labor of persistence
Without a doubt, the precarity of an overseas Filipino worker's (OFW) life is augmented by the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily through the economic and political consequences that such public health crises engender. However, while primarily seen in terms of their economic and political dimensions, these consequences also affectively disrupt the life of OFWs. In this paper, I trace the various conflicting ways that OFWs, who were terminated from their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, have dealt with their emotions while still in their respective host countries, and, trying to find a way to return home. Drawing from Arlie Hochschild (1983) concept of emotional labor, I argue that the OFWs perform what I am provisionally calling the emotional labor of persistence. This type of emotion work, though tied to, and enabled by the precarious conditions in which the respondents live, is a resistive and agential kind of emotional labor. It allows the OFWs to endure precarity, and in the process, find ways to elude, confront, or question the modes of thinking and feeling in which they are constantly circumscribed by the demands of their overseas work and overall precarious situation.
A fragmented sense of home: Reconfiguring therapeutic coastal encounters in Covid-19 times
A growing body of research suggests positive links between coastal proximity, interaction, human health and wellbeing. In 2020, following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people in the UK could not engage in their usual coastal practices due to a national lockdown and associated restrictions, including government bans in entering the sea. This paper shares findings from an exploratory study examining how these restrictions shaped the recreational coastal practices, perceptions and emotions of residents in the case study region of Devon, South West England. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 12 residents, with varying domestic and employment circumstances in the pandemic. We foreground three key themes identified through an inductive thematic analysis of the interviews: feeling 'at home' with the sea, experiencing a fragmented sense of home with Covid-19, and reconfiguring the coast as a therapeutic landscape. While important to understand the links between coastal proximity, health and wellbeing, we highlight the value of gaining more nuanced insights into the emotional, social, material and temporal dynamics that can re-shape the therapeutic potential of coastal encounter in the largely unprecedented situation of a global pandemic.
"'Ninja' levels of focus": Therapeutic holding environments and the affective atmospheres of telepsychology during the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 crisis in Australia led to a rapid increase in the use of telehealth services to offer psychological therapy (often referred to as 'telepsychology'). In this article, we discuss the intersection of the social psychology concepts of therapeutic holding spaces and containment with more-than-human theory as it relates to Australia's mental health sector during the COVID-19 crisis. Drawing on our recent qualitative survey research into Australian psychologists' use of telepsychology during the crisis, we consider the ways that they worked to build and maintain therapeutic holding spaces and alliances over teleconferencing platforms during this extraordinary time of social crisis and isolation. We explore and contextualise three important findings from our study: 1) the limited viewing area of a flat screen makes it difficult for therapists to read and respond to their client's body language and requires different forms of returned bodily gestures in order to show empathy; 2) most respondents implemented different affective and relational strategies online to ensure they were not missing important non-verbal cues from their clients; and 3) the traditionally 'safe' therapeutic holding space created in face-to-face therapy can be easily subverted by client-end interruptions, and concerns around safety or personal privacy in the client's home environment. In bringing these issues to the fore, we highlight the online therapeutic holding space as a temporally and socially situated human-technological assemblage in which a series of affective, spatial, relational and sense-making agencies coverage, opening or closing off capacities for therapists and their clients.
"Love is calling": Academic friendship and international research collaboration amid a global pandemic
In this intervention we desire to document and celebrate our own international research collaboration as an intimate long-distance relationship that sustains us amid a global pandemic of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. We share "love letter" poems that we wrote to each other, in response to a poem by Yayoi Kusama titled "Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears," incorporated into her mirror room installation "Love is Calling." In our discussion we upon the emotional connections that sustain academic researchers, particularly those relationships that extend beyond national boundaries and conventional heteronormative expectations.
Reflections on a failed participatory workshop in Northern Chile: Negotiating boycotts, benefits, and the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people
In this paper, we critically analyse our experiences of initiating participatory research in the challenging context of the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. We use our experience of organising participatory workshops with Aymara and Quechua women community leaders to reflect on the politics of participation/non-participation, and explore these experiences in light of our multiple and overlapping positionalities as Chilean/British, male/female, white/mestizo. In the light of one workshop being entirely unsuccessful, we discuss the ways in which our empirical and methodological thinking has nevertheless been enriched by this experience. We situate the challenges we faced in relation to negotiating the tensions presented by debates on decolonising research from our positions within the neoliberal academy, exploring the questions raised by indigenous women activists' research 'refusal', and critically reflect upon the emotional responses this situation elicited in each of us. We argue for the importance of embracing such apparent fieldwork 'failures' and, recognising the resulting emotional swirl of panic, anxiety and inadequacy that they produce, emphasise these experiences as illustrative of the inherent tensions around decolonising research, as well as an often inevitable element of conducting research with marginalised communities involved in socio-environmental conflicts.
The 'present-tense' experience of failure in the university: Reflections from an action research project
This article reflects on insights from an action research project where we worked with students whose university experience was inhibited by the fear of failure. In contrast to the popular concept of 'learning from failure', which involves intellectualizing the experience and distancing ourselves from it, our findings demonstrate the importance of a 'present tense' focus on emotions and affects in order to understand the experience of failure for students. Doing so brings us face-to-face with the often painful experience of failure in the present moment which, we argue, is an important and valid part of the university experience. We conclude by reflecting on the kinds of spaces and skills that may be needed to work with this new understanding of failure and show that developing these is a crucial part of resisting neoliberalism and creating a more 'care-full' (Mountz et al., 2015) academy.
Skywalking in the city: Glass platforms and the architecture of vertigo
•The paper explores the ambivalent concept of vertigo and its significance for contemporary architecture.•It examines in particular the rise of elevated glass platforms through concepts of transparency, experience, and kinaesthesia.•Proposes that these emerging design features constitute a kind of 'sixth façade'.•Discusses this phenomenon as a spatial manifestation of the experience economy.•Concludes by highlighting the rise of 'architectures of vertigo' in relation to wider social imperatives.
"It's like you are just a spectator in this thing": Experiencing social life the 'aspie' way
This study explores the experiences of people with Asperger syndrome (AS) from a sociological perspective using the theoretical approaches of ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. In-depth interviews were conducted with 16 people with AS and three key themes of feeling different, trying to fit in and safe spaces are considered here. We suggest that people with AS develop a different symbolic capacity to most people and have difficulties in making sense of social encounters. While these difficulties can be overcome, to some degree, by developing strategies to try to fit in, this learning remains at a superficial level and is not internalised through the process of socialisation. Without being able to derive a firm sense of reality from spontaneous involvement in social encounters, participants feel "unruled, unreal and anomic" (Goffman, 1967: 135) and experience intense autistic emotion (Davidson, 2007a,b).