Wallace, Claire and Mytna-Kurekova, Lucia and Leon, Margarita and O’Reilly, Jacqueline and Blome, Constantin and Bussi, Margarita and Faith, Becky and Finney, Mark and Leschke, Janine and Ruffa, Chiara and Russell, Emma and AhSchøyen, Mi and Thurer, Matthias and Unt, Marge and Verdin, Rachel (2023) Governmentality Versus Community : The Impact of the COVID Lockdowns. International Journal of Community Well-Being, 6 (3). pp. 223-240. ISSN 2524-5295
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
The COVID lockdowns were characterised by new forms of governmentality as lives were disrupted and controlled through the vertical transmission of biopolitics by the state. The paper considers how this was experienced by academics in 11 different countries through analysis of diaries written during the first lockdown. The paper asks if communities can offer an alternative to governmentality by looking at three levels: the national, the neighbourhood and the personal. Whilst at a national level the idea of community was instrumentalised to encourage compliance to extraordinary measures, at the local level community compassion through helping neighbours encouraged horizontal connections that could offer a “space” within the dominant logic of governmentality. At the level of personal communities, the digitalisation of social relationships helped to create supportive networks over widely dispersed areas but these were narrowly rather than widely focused, avoiding critical discussion.