23/03/20
 
About this blog
„Witnessing Corona“ is inviting contributions of max 2000 words that address questions of: – Social solidarity and moral blaming – Living a life in social and/or physical isolation – Unequal biosocial and/or psychological vulnerabilities – Political-economic implications for healthcare infrastructures – Historically contingent forms, possibilities, and risks of governmental intervention – And a host of […]

09/05/22
BioNTainer
A Manufacturing Solution for Africa or Circumventing Capacity?
On the occasion of the EU-Africa Summit in February this year in Brussels, several African Heads of State and public health experts were traveling to Europe. BioNTech used the opportunity to invite the presidents of Senegal Macky Sall, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, the Head of the African CDC John Nkengasong, […]

11/06/21
Your Life is Data
Wie erleben Studierende die Pandemie?
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 der Wissensproduktion vorgeschlagen, da sie lediglich die Forschenden selbst erfordert. Ich möchte mithilfe dieser Technik […]

27/04/21
How Disproportionately Affected LGBTQ+ Community Queerly Responds to COVID-19 in the UK
A Personal Exploration
If you know a friend or yourself from the LGBT+ community, chances are good that you know that we all like a bit of fun. Well life has already made a joke out of us (we aren’t ashamed of our sexuality, it is the binary world that is uneasy about our nonconformity), why not having […]

17/03/21
China: The Unpopular Winner of the Year in Pandemic Times
Resilience in China under COVID-19
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 across the world. China, like other countries in the Global South, has severely been hit […]

05/03/21
Agricultural Workers in Turkey during the Pandemic
Some Ethnographic Observations
This post aims to deliver the experiences of people who are working temporarily on farms and/or in fresh produce packaging operations. The ideas presented here are informed by my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork which I am still executing at the time of writing up this text. The people whose experiences I am writing about are mainly […]

11/02/21
Pandemic Affects, Planetary Specters, and the Precarious Everyday
Encountering Covid-19 as a Nomad with (Half)Grown Roots
“Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa.” A specter is haunting Europe. – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) Until there is breath, there is hope! A Bengali Proverb[1]     “Material nature, it is said, is the reason for cause and effect and agency; the person is said to be the cause in the experiencing […]

17/12/20
Does COVID-19 facilitate new migration?
Exploring a fast-expanding Indian diaspora in Germany
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. On the other hand, forced migration during the pandemic has brought forth devastating effects in the lives […]

07/10/20
Hier in Berlin-Wilmersdorf
Autoethnographische Erkundungen des spirituellen Umgangs mit der Corona-Pandemie
“There is no safe place.” (Walter Mignolo 2011:62)   In Berlin-Wilmersdorf, wo ich wohne, sieht es gerade etwas wie am FKK-Strand an der Ostsee von Graal-Müritz aus. Die Sonne strahlt vom Himmel, die Menschen spazieren gut gelaunt durch die Gegend, nur zwitschern hier in Berlin die Spatzen von den Bäumen statt der im Wind fliegenden […]

05/10/20
Instagram as a Catalyst for Digital Gemeinschaft During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Vietnam
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 seen and felt in recent months. Across the world the recursive patterns of daily life suddenly […]

24/08/20
The Militarisation of the COVID-19 Response in South Africa
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 shifting as we try to hold the scale of the pandemic in conversation with the unfolding […]