Living in bubbles during the coronavirus pandemic: insights from New Zealand

This report presents initial research findings on the ‘social bubbles’ policy that the New Zealand government adopted as part of its strategy for curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The concept of ‘the bubble’ proved effective at conveying the necessity of exclusive containment, while foregrounding the importance of mutual care and support that might stretch beyond a single household or home. It allowed New Zealanders who were isolated, vulnerable, or struggling to receive the care and support they needed. This success partly resulted from the strong emphasis placed on ‘being kind’ within the New Zealand government’s public narrative of the lockdown. Bubbles were expanded when it would keep people ‘safe and well’. There was high compliance with the mandate to keep bubbles exclusive, and the concept of exclusivity within an expanded bubble was generally – if not always – well understood. Adaptation to ‘the bubble’ as a new social form was not always straightforward, however, and bubble relationships could be strained by divergent risk perceptions, or differing interpretations of ambiguous guidelines. Moreover, some groups systematically found it harder to enjoy the full benefits of living in a bubble: people living in flatshare arrangements, co-parents living apart, recently arrived migrants and people who were active in the workplace. Once infection rates are sufficiently low and appropriate contact tracing infrastructures are in place, a social bubbles policy could be very effective in other countries, especially if concrete steps are taken to pre-empt some of the difficulties and inequalities that were evident in New Zealand

Lockdown Ibuism: experiences of Indonesian migrant mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand

Lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 have been widely shown to heighten care burdens within households and ‘bubbles.’ Responsibility for meeting such burdens often falls disproportionately upon women. It is nevertheless important for research on gendered inequalities during COVID-19 to attend to the particularities of how such care work was experienced by differently positioned women. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesian migrant mothers’ experiences of lockdown were mediated by the disadvantages they faced as ‘non-native’ speakers of English, as well as by the ideology of Ibuism (‘motherism’) they were socialised into during their lives in Indonesia. This socialisation led many to find life under lockdown life both rewarding and stressful in ways distinct from other women and mothers in Aotearoa New Zealand who were confronting similar demands. We thus argue for the importance of a qualitative and intersectional approach

Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview

In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005), I investigate how the pragmatic context of interviews can introduce a form of symbolic violence to narrative accounts. Specifically, I use the term “genre of complaint” to highlight how anthropological research interviews in biomedical settings invoke certain typified forms of suffering that call for the rectification of perceived injustices. Interview narratives articulated in the genre of complaint privilege specific types of pain and suffering and cast others into the background. Giving an account of one’s pain is thus a strategic and selective process, creating interruptions and silences as much as moments of clarity. Therefore, I argue that medical anthropologists ought to attend more closely to the institutional structures and relations that shape the production of illness narratives in interview encounters

Digital Care: Agency and Temporality in Young People’s Use of Health Apps

This paper draws from interviews with 21 young New Zealanders, ages 16-24, to examine how health apps shape young people’s experiences of themselves as agentive subjects in relation to their physical and mental wellbeing. Focusing on the intended and unintended effects of health apps, I examine how digital care technologies recast the spatiality and temporality of healthcare, enabling new ways of constituting and tracking health, expanding possibilities of interactive exchanges with others, and redistributing a sense of agency and control. In many ways, the forms of self-governance that health apps engender are no different from other moves to promote increased self-responsibility that are cultivated as part of advanced liberalism. However, I argue that by collapsing the spatial and temporal relations of technology use, health apps not only heighten opportunities for adopting self-responsibility, but also, as many young people attest, promote the feeling that there is no escaping from them. The result is that for many young people having a sense of control and responsibility over their health comes to be calibrated against not only the inherent inter-sociality of care (i.e. young people’s desires to both give and receive care to and from others), but also the health and fitness “demands” seemingly made upon them by technology itself

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

Digital Care: Agency and Temporality in Young People’s Use of Health Apps

This paper draws from interviews with 21 young New Zealanders, ages 16-24, to examine how health apps shape young people’s experiences of themselves as agentive subjects in relation to their physical and mental wellbeing. Focusing on the intended and unintended effects of health apps, I examine how digital care technologies recast the spatiality and temporality of healthcare, enabling new ways of constituting and tracking health, expanding possibilities of interactive exchanges with others, and redistributing a sense of agency and control. In many ways, the forms of self-governance that health apps engender are no different from other moves to promote increased self-responsibility that are cultivated as part of advanced liberalism. However, I argue that by collapsing the spatial and temporal relations of technology use, health apps not only heighten opportunities for adopting self-responsibility, but also, as many young people attest, promote the feeling that there is no escaping from them. The result is that for many young people having a sense of control and responsibility over their health comes to be calibrated against not only the inherent inter-sociality of care (i.e. young people’s desires to both give and receive care to and from others), but also the health and fitness “demands” seemingly made upon them by technology itself