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…
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 COVID-19 pandemic has gravitated a shift in teaching practices across the world. The fear of contagion and the necessity of social distancing have rendered traditional classroom teaching impossible. Over the last two months, the higher education sector has…
Refugees in Indonesia are stuck in “troubled transit” (Missbach 2015), hoping for resettlement, living in a constant state of uncertainty. Their ‘refugee’ identities are defined by their past traumas and search for a future home. In their present state…
As has been widely reported, a novel coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China in December 2019. Spreading rapidly through the city, and eventually the province of Hubei in January, countries and cities in the region started to implement travel restrictions in…
These are my preliminary thoughts during the first two weeks of being at home from work, in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). I teach at a university in this city, the capital of the eastern Indian state, West Bengal. On 14…