Separations and solidarities: emergent ethics in the pandemic urban.

John Clarke - Professor Emeritus, The Open University, Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow, 2019-2021.

COVID-19 has been disruptive in many ways. It has acted on pre-existing social fault lines and inequalities. It has dislocated existing spatial and temporal orders, in the dynamics of the city, in relationships between home and work, in temporal rhythms, regimes and routines. Those disruptions have created conditions of possibility for ‘emergent ethics’ but in conflicted and contradictory ways. In this presentation I will explore some of them, treating social actors as engaged in the work of situated ‘practical reasoning’ (as “little Bakhtinians”):

1. The contradictory dynamics of sociality between forms of separation and emergent solidarities (in localities and neighbourhoods, across groups and across nations);
2. The politicized – and dramatized – conflicts between lives, livelihoods and liberties in response to Covid-19 measures;
3. The intersection of pre-pandemic movements and the Covid-19 crisis – in particular the conjunction of Black Lives Matter protests and racialised inequalities in pandemic deaths; and finally,
4. The temporal disjunctures of the pandemic and the ‘yearning’ (Jansen) to get ‘back to normal’.