This is the second in a series of blog posts chronicling research in the time of Covid19. In writing these pieces, we are exploring ways to try and use the pandemic restrictions as a means of thinking productively about our case study areas and the mobilities (and now immobilities) that are coming to bear on them. Stay tuned for the next piece in the series!
Things to See in the Bavarian Forest
In his 2017 article ‘Predicting zoonoses’, the American science writer Karl Gruber notes that global pandemics are ‘wicked problems’ in so far as the planet is ‘riddled by invisible pathogens that could jump into humans at any time anywhere in the world.’ The article is prescient, but pandemics like COVID-19 are very much part of our world, and they have been for some time now. It’s easy enough to blame the germs – that malevolent host of invisible enemies that perversely spawn and spread within us – yet it is not the viruses that are the villains, nor the various animals that carry them, but rather we ourselves for having created and consolidated the conditions under which they emerge. As my ‘Corridor Talk’ colleagues have already pointed out, the ironies begin to multiply when a research project organized around the relationship between human/animal mobility and boundaries is stymied by a pandemic in which invisible creatures effortlessly breach one kind of protective boundary (the human epidermis) even as another (national borders) is pre-emptively closed. The question of access is central here – who has the right to move or not, and the extent to which unwanted movements are controllable – but equally important is the question of visibility itself.
Continue reading “The Covid Chronicles Part II: Invisibilities”
CONSERVATION HUMANITIES 