British Academy, The COVID decade: understanding the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19 – open access report

The British Academy was asked by the Government Office for Science to produce an independent review on the long-term societal impacts of COVID-19. This report outlines the evidence across a range of areas, building upon a series of expert reviews, engagement, synthesis and analysis across the research community in the Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (SHAPE). It is accompanied by a separate report, Shaping the COVID decade, which considers how policymakers might respond. History shows that pandemics and other crises can be catalysts to rebuild society in new ways, but that this requires vision and interconnectivity between policymakers at local, regional and national levels.

With the advent of vaccines and the imminent ending of lockdowns, we might think that the impact of COVID-19 is coming to an end. This would be wrong. We are in a COVID decade: the social, economic and cultural effects of the pandemic will cast a long shadow into the future – perhaps longer than a decade – and the sooner we begin to understand, the better placed we will be to address them.

There are of course many impacts which flowed from lockdowns, including not being able to see family and friends, travel or take part in leisure activities. These should ease quickly as lockdown comes to an end. But there are a set of deeper impacts on health and wellbeing, communities and cohesion, and skills, employment and the economy which will have profound effects upon the UK for many years to come. In sum, the pandemic has exacerbated existing inequalities and differences and created new ones, as well as exposing critical societal needs and strengths. These can emerge differently across places, and along different time courses, for individuals, communities, regions, nations and the UK as a whole.

We organised the evidence into three areas of societal effect. As we gathered evidence in these three areas, we continually assessed it according to five cross-cutting themes – governance, inequalities, cohesion, trust and sustainability – which the reader will find reflected across the chapters. Throughout the process of collating and assessing the evidence, the dimensions of place (physical and social context, locality), scale (individual, community, regional, national) and time (past, present, future; short, medium and longer term) played a significant role in assessing the nature of the societal impacts and how they might play out, altering their long-term effects. The three societal areas we chose to help structure our evidence collection and, ultimately, this report were:

Health and wellbeing – covering physical and mental health (including young people and work), wellbeing, and the environment we live in

Communities, culture and belonging – covering communities and civil society, cities and towns, family and kinship, and arts, media, culture, heritage and sport

Knowledge, employment and skills – covering education (compulsory and tertiary), skills, knowledge and research, and work and employment

Books received – a couple by Julia Kristeva, Jean-Paul Demoule, Ernst Cassirer, Pour Emile Benveniste, Mircea Eliade, Carlo Ginzburg, and Tiphaine Samayoult on Roland Barthes.

Andy Merrifield, Lefebvre in the age of COVID: Lessons from The Urban Revolution and Paris Commune – Monthly Review online

Henri Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution (1970) quietly celebrated its 50^th birthday under lockdown, and our greatest ever urban revolution, the Paris Commune (1871), just toasted its 150^th. Both book and event have lost none of their lustre for helping progressive people think about city life, even as COVID-19 threatens to destroy that life. We might say especially as COVID-19 threatens that life, because both The Urban Revolution and the Paris Commune offer vital instruction about how we might rebuild a post-pandemic urban world, rebuild it democratically.

COVID has upended urban life as we once knew it. But it intensified already existing pathologies, those contaminating “normal,” pre-pandemic life. For decades, business-as-usual exploitation has meant cities have become not only functionally and financially standardised, but also unaffordable and unequal. Recent social distancing disrupts these inequities even more, crimping cities as sites of physical encounters, hurting poorer, immobile denizens the most. Nowadays, our urban reality is one of the de-encounter, a thinning down rather than thickening up, the dispersion and dilution of city life, its fear and loathing. [continues here]

Nick Vaughan-Williams, Vernacular Border Security: Citizens’ Narratives of Europe’s ‘Migration Crisis’ – Oxford University Press, June 2021

Since the peak of Europe’s so-called 2015 ‘migration crisis’, the dominant governmental response has been to turn to deterrent border security across the Mediterranean and construct border walls throughout the EU. During the same timeframe, EU citizens are widely represented – by politicians, by media sources, and by opinion polls – as fearing a loss of control over national and EU borders. Despite the intensification of EU border security with visibly violent effects, EU citizens are portrayed as ‘threatened majorities’. These dynamics beg the question: Why is it that tougher deterrent border security and walling appear to have heightened rather than diminished border anxieties among EU citizens? While the populist mantra of ‘taking back control’ purports to speak on behalf of EU citizens, little is known about how diverse EU citizens conceptualize, understand, and talk about the so-called ‘crisis’. Yet, if social and cultural meanings of ‘migration’ and ‘border security’ are constructed intersubjectively and contested politically, then EU citizens —as well as governmental elites and people on the move— are significant in shaping dominant framings of and responses to the ‘crisis’. This book argues that, in order to address the overarching puzzle, a conceptual and methodological shift is required in the way that border security is understood: a new approach is urgently required that complements ‘top-down’ analyses of elite governmental practices with ‘bottom-up’ vernacular studies of how those practices are both reproduced and contested in everyday life.

Tuomo Alhojärvi, For Postcapitalist Studies: Inheriting Futures of Space and Economy – Nordia, March 2021

The worldwide social and ecological unravelling of the 21st century presents an unprecedented challenge for thinking and practising liveable economies. As life support systems are annihilated in view of the sustainable accumulation of capital, social and economic alternatives are rapidly emerging to shelter possibilities for life amidst the ruins. Postcapitalism has gained increasing attention as an invitation to amplify existing alternatives to systemic scale. The transformations required are the focus of social movements, political projects and academic research that demand the theorisation and organisation of alternatives to capitalist realism today. What has often received less attention is how such emancipatory alternatives are burdened with problematic legacies living on within, in the epistemic heritage enabling and organising societal transformation. The ‘post-’ prefix, and the break from capitalism that it announces, has largely been treated as a given. This study resists such temptations of the affirmative in order to ask how restrictive and counterproductive burdens are carried along in emancipatory thought and practice, and how their continuous negotiation might have to redefine postcapitalism itself. Taking the ‘post-’ seriously demands critical and theoretical skills capable of examining the complexity of our inherited troubles.