The Research Imagination During COVID-19: Rethinking Norms of Group Size and Authorship in Anthropological and Anthropology-Adjacent Collaborations

This article explores some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a collective critical event for anthropologists and other social scientists, examining how it has promoted new configurations of the research imagination. We draw on our own experiences of participating in a team of 17 researchers, hailing from anthropology and anthropology-adjacent disciplines, to research social life in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the pandemic, examining how our own research imaginations were transformed during, and via, the process of our collaboration. When our project first began, many of us had doubts reflective of norms, prejudices and anxieties that are common in our disciplines: that the group would be too large to function effectively, or that it would be impossible to develop an approach to authorship that would allow everyone to feel their contributions had been adequately recognised. In practice, the large group size was a key strength in allowing our group to work effectively. Difficulties with authorship did not arise from within the group but from disconnects between our preferred ways of working and the ways authorship was imagined within various professional and publishing bodies. We conclude that large-scale collaborations have many points in their favour, and that the research imaginations of funders, journals, universities and professional associations should be broadened to ensure that they are encouraged, supported and adequately rewarded. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

States Reimagined: COVID-19, the Ordinary, and Extraordinary in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Shifting public imaginaries have played a vital role in shaping government and citizen responses to COVID-19 in Aotearoa/New Zealand. During the nation's first COVID-19 lockdown, the general public expressed support, and at times even enthusiasm, for strict measures put in place to curb the spread of the virus. Less than a year later, what had begun as a nationalistic rallying cry to 'unite together' and 'be kind' while 'combatting COVID-19' took on more sinister tones through government-sponsored moral panic, including the blaming and shaming of those who did not or could not uphold COVID-19 regulations. At the same time, growing dissent, particularly by those protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates, steadily chipped away at government-promoted images of national solidarity. By early 2022, with the spread of omicron, the government stepped away from attempting to eradicate the virus and jettisoned its collectivist message, highlighting instead each New Zealander's 'personal responsibility' to try and stay well. This article traces how citizen-State relations have been reimagined in Aotearoa/NZ over the first two years of the pandemic, the effects of various pubic- and government-supported moral imaginaries in enabling the government to exercise 'extra-ordinary' powers, and the power and fragility of national consensus-building in the midst of crisis. I suggest how examining the pandemic and pandemic responses as a 'collective critical event' enables us to trace not only how it altered citizens' visions of the State, but their active engagements in reconfiguring and reimagining various states of social, economic, and cultural life.

Re-imagining Time in the Midst of Crisis: From Sci Fi Thrillers and Zombie Flicks to Young People's Lived Temporalities of COVID-19

Popular films often depict pandemics in apocalyptic ways, temporally portraying how day by day, fear increases as a virus takes over the world. The speed of transmission, alongside the virus's seemingly unstoppable global spread, evoke a sense of being engulfed by the extraordinary, creating an experience of time characterised by feelings of intensity and fear, both on and off-screen. In contrast, the lived realities of young New Zealanders during the COVID-19 pandemic speak to a more elongated, 'empty' experience of time that lacks such intensity. Our interviews with New Zealand youth revealed their sense of time as ever-shifting, characterised occasionally by moments of fear and anxiety, but much more so by long hours of boredom and disturbing lack of structure, particularly during lockdowns. This paper draws on Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, alongside Bergson's insights into lived experiences of time and Deleuze's Cinema books, to compare the emotional temporalities of two leading science fiction pandemic films, 'Contagion' and 'Outbreak', and a range of popular zombie movies, to young New Zealanders' lived experiences of multiple COVID-19 lockdowns. We consider how New Zealand youth (in our interviews, but also on social media) narrate their lived experiences of COVID-19 by drawing upon an 'imaginative repertoire' made up of sci fi films, zombie references and moral ideas of the self, which can help us to better understand how temporality is reshaped during a pandemic, particularly for young people.

Reconsidering the declaration of 'crisis' while living through one

What counts as a 'crisis'? How do we determine an 'emergency'? Who gets to do so, and what exactly is at stake? Scholarly examinations of 'crises', including, most notably, seminal work by Janet Roitman (2013), frequently underscores how the 'crisis imaginary' is employed to rapidly and unjustifiably expand State power. Certainly, State responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have amply demonstrated this critique, as was noted early on by both Agamben (2020) and Chomsky (2020). Nonetheless, regardless of its political manipulations, crisis can also be understood as a phenomenological state, as there exist moments during which we collectively experience being plunged into a radically different time-space that is perhaps best conceptualised as a 'collective critical event'. Such 'extraordinary' times have been denoted as events beyond the scope of narration (Briggs 2003);'failure[s] of the grammar of the ordinary' (Das 2007);or moments of incredulity that surpass our capacities of narration. By focusing on the languaging of the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa/New Zealand, this Position Piece grapples with how to reconcile the insights offered by critiques of the political deployment of claims of 'crises' with anthropological and other phenomenological accounts of experiences of moments of profound upheaval.

Blowing bubbles: COVID-19, New Zealand’s bubble metaphor, and the limits of households as sites of responsibility and care

When New Zealand embarked on its COVID-19 lockdown, the world saw the emergence of a new social form: the “bubble.” This chapter examines bubbles for the social dynamics they enabled and elided, as well as for what the bubble metaphor suggested but did not always deliver. During level 4 lockdown, most New Zealanders (with exceptions such as essential service workers) were restricted to physical contact with members of their residence - a social unit the government referred to as the members of one’s “home, " “household, " or “bubble.” Not all care relations can, however, be reduced to a single home or household, nor are all households units of care. Regulations enabling bubble expansions in specific circumstances provided some means of addressing care needs that superseded households (e.g., singletons becoming “bubble buddies” to mitigate loneliness). But little was done for those consigned to bubbles whose members were unattached to one another, much less antagonistic. There is thus a need for bubble regulations to match more closely the flexibility inherent in the bubble as a concept when planning for future crises. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, J. Michael Ryan;individual chapters, the contributors.

'Safer communities horizontal ellipsis together'? Plural policing and COVID-19 public health interventions in Aotearoa New Zealand

International media have praised Aotearoa New Zealand for its response to the coronavirus pandemic. While New Zealand Police played a fundamental role in enforcing pandemic control measures, the policing landscape remained plural. This article employs Loader [2000. Plural policing and democratic governance. Social and legal studies, 9 (3), 323-345] model of plural policing to understand responses to public health emergencies. It identifies two forms of policing which were evident in Aotearoa during the COVID-19 lockdown that should be added to Loader's model. First, we argue that contexts with colonial history require that the model not only includes by-government and below-government policing but also next-to-government policing by Indigenous peoples - such as the 'community checkpoints' run by Maori. Second, and further developing Loader's model, we argue that the category of below-government policing be expanded to include 'peer-to-peer policing' in which government responsibilizes members of the public to subject each other to large-scale surveillance and social control. Since plural forms of policing affect each other's functionality and legitimacy, we argue that what happens at the synapses between policing nodes has profound implications for the process of community building. Because community building is essential to fighting pandemics, we conclude that the policing of pandemic intervention measures may require an expanded understanding and practice of plural policing to support an optimal public health strategy.