Mein Leben als Material für meine anthropologische Forschung? Genau diesen Ansatz verfolgt die sogenannte Autoethnographie. Dabei bilden die autobiographischen Beobachtungen der Forschenden die Grundlage des Datenmaterials. Diese Herangehensweise wird von den Sozialwissenschaftler:innen Roy und Uekusa (2020: 384) als pandemie-konforme Methode…
China: The Unpopular Winner of the Year in Pandemic Times. Resilience in China under COVID-19 (#WitnessingCorona)
If coronavirus is a game with all the countries as players who were dragged into it involuntarily, China seems to be the unpopular winner of the year (Spross 2021). Looking back at 2020, COVID-19 unleashed a global pandemic that swept…
Pandemic Affects, Planetary Specters, and the Precarious Everyday: Encountering COVID-19 as a Nomad with (Half)Grown Roots (#WitnessingCorona)
Pandemics are planetary specters that haunt our more-than-human world. The “specter” of planetary destruction in the Anthropocene remains “the event of our time” (Ruddick 2015, 1115). Calling the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) another planetary specter heightens the serious material nature…
Does COVID-19 Facilitate New Migration? Exploring a Fast-Expanding Indian Diaspora in Germany (#WitnessingCorona)
Mobility and the Coronavirus The coronavirus has impacted mobility in more ways than just one. On the one hand, international mobility has almost come to a standstill due to national lockdowns and restrictions on airplanes and long-distance trains.…
Instagram as a Catalyst for Digital Gemeinschaft During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Vietnam (#WitnessingCorona)
In early 2020, news articles documenting a possible coronavirus pandemic began appearing in countries worldwide, and while concerns were rife, few could have envisaged that so many of society’s taken-for-granted routines and norms would endure the disruption so visibly…
The Militarisation of the COVID-19 Response in South Africa (#WitnessingCorona)
The imponderabilia of our COVID times As medical anthropologists well versed in the social grammar of infectious disease, the global spread of the coronavirus has pressed us to the edges of history. Writing from the centre, the ground keeps…