Journaling the COVID‐19 pandemic: Locality, scale, and spatialised bodies

• Published in: Geographical Research 2021-05, Vol.59 (2), p.217-227
• Main Author: Burton, Alexander Luke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Autoethnography; Careers; COVID-19; Diaries; Disease control; embodiment; Helicopters; Human body; journaling; Locality; Pandemics; scale; Special | Commentaries on Covid‐19; Surveillance
• ISSN: 1745-5863; 1745-5871
• DOI: 10.1111/1745-5871.12459

COVID‐19 has reconfigured, reaffirmed, and revealed socio‐material geographies in Australia and around the world. The pandemic is international but experiences of it exist in situated contexts. From strategies organising the human body by placing tape on supermarket floors to those using helicopter surveillance to identify illegal Easter barbecues, the impacts of COVID‐19 are mediated across different scales and are not experienced equally. In this article, I show how the COVID‐19 pandemic has revealed and compounded injustices and presented an opportunity to confront them. COVID‐19 is expressed via the production and circulation of meaning and diverse practices involving or implicating bodies, localities, and scales; among them one might include the advent of social distancing, the invention of “Fortress Tasmania,” from whence this work is written, and the constitution of bodies as dangerous yet vulnerable. I use autoethnography as an early career researcher and student trying to make sense of the COVID‐19 pandemic. This situated experience offers empirical diversity, context, and evocative narratives to enrich understandings of COVID‐19. The autoethnography is both a therapeutic outlet for a journaling, isolating honours student in suburban Tasmania and an attempt to make sense of body, locality, and scale in the geographies of pandemic.