Dialogues in Human Geography

The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in the most devastating global public health crisis in over a century. At present, over 10 million people from around the world have contracted the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to more than 500,000 deaths globally. The global health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic has been compounded by political, economic, and social crises that have exacerbated existing inequalities and disproportionately affected the most vulnerable segments of society. The global pandemic has had profoundly geographical consequences, and as the current crisis continues to unfold, there is a pressing need for geographers and other scholars to critically examine its fallout. This introductory article provides an overview of the current special issue on the geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes 42 commentaries written by contributors from across the globe. Collectively, the contributions in this special issue highlight the diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and thematic foci that geographical scholarship can offer to better understand the uneven geographies of the Coronavirus/COVID-19.

COVID-19 has resulted in new global geographies of death ranging from cellular to global scales. These geographies are uneven, reflecting existing inequalities and failures of governance. In addition to death and bereavement, the pandemic has generated varied forms of loss and consolation, as well as negative and positive affective atmospheres, whereby emotions are mobilised and politicised. Understanding these emotional-affective topographies and ‘emotional-viral-loads’ is vital to wellbeing, resilience, and unfolding policy interventions locally and globally.

Mutual aid is the fundamental basis of all human societies, an understanding that is exemplified with striking clarity during times of crises. The coronavirus pandemic has brought the caring geographies of mutual aid into sharp relief with the failings of both capitalism and the state. Beyond fear and uncertainty, this commentary examines the one single theme that has resonated with the COVID-19 pandemic more than all others: care.

The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to think more deeply about who and what we value in society, with value determined not on conditions set by capital but instead on achieving meaning in life. In this commentary, we pose a series of interconnected questions to geography: What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Furthermore, is such a life possible under capitalism? And what does a society that prioritizes meaningful life look like?

Drawing on a virtual ethnography, we explore how the increase in remote working has created unequal domestic rearrangements of parenting duties with respect to gender relations during the COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. We also discuss the resources that mothers have mobilized to create a network of social support in the organization of care.

In this commentary, we reflect on the limitations, somber difficulties, and possibilities of new geographies of care that have emerged as a result of our limited personal geographies during the time of COVID-19.

Exploring liveabilities as more than survival, this commentary underscores how survival remains important in these #COVIDtimes. Discussing our privileges and resistances as queer women with various intersectionalities, we offer transnational notes on negotiating, surviving, and living in these non-normative times.

We argue that it is time for geography as a discipline to embrace intersectionality. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as the subject of analysis, we raise questions for geographers about the novel coronavirus’ overlapping impacts. We argue that intersectional feminist approaches yield anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-oppressive research outcomes.

This commentary first documents the ways in which President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has evoked securitized discursive strategies that frame Brazil’s national response to COVID-19 as a matter of defense instead of public health. We then ask: What does it mean to talk about the virus and the ways to address it through war-framings? We argue that the Bolsonaro administration has framed the COVID-19 pandemic as an extra-territorial threat in an effort to create internal stability while failing to handle the matter effectively. Such politically motivated spatial framings inhibit an effective response in Brazil and pose a severe threat to public health. Once COVID-19 becomes securitized, the response is framed by the military bureaucracy rather than public health authorities, resulting in dangerous consequences.

This commentary examines how coordinated management and emergency response (CMER) have been mobilized within the United States and Ireland to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing upon a performative conception of scale, I argue that it is crucial to recognize the potency of the scalar politics of CMER organization to understand the differences in public health responses within and between political jurisdictions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global event, but what became apparent almost immediately was that while the virus seems indiscriminate, vulnerability and the capacity to mitigate its impact are not spread equally, either between or within countries. Years of austere neoliberalism in Europe have exacerbated inequality and precarity, acting as a ‘pre-existing condition’ onto which the virus has now landed. The question we ask is: when the pandemic subsides, can the underlying conditions of contemporary neoliberalism remain? And what may replace it?

In virulent times, can we still practice solidarity and avoid exclusion and violence for collective public health? This commentary explores Taiwan’s current and previous encounters with viruses to consider how its historically, locally, and socially contingent making of health practices might inform better global human-virus co-existence for the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic is global in scope, yet responses to the pandemic have varied considerably by national context, thereby reinforcing what Agnew (1994) has called the ‘territorial trap’. This commentary extends geographical scholarship by considering three territorial traps at play in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly pertaining to the governance of international travel and migration, inter-state coordination, and territorial thinking.

As COVID-19 spreads, new processes, forms, and scales of bordering practices are transcending national territorial limits. This commentary critiques how ‘viral borders’ are securitizing the global supply chains of medical products, disciplining citizens, and reterritorializing communities and contemplates the consequences of these practices for the post-pandemic era.

In response to COVID-19, this commentary explores the disproportionate impacts that the pandemic is having on Indigenous nations of Turtle Island (North America) and the rendering of Indigenous borders as sites of compassionate community care. I argue that settler colonialism during COVID-19 is enacted through travel and second-home escapism of urban elites.

Southeast Asian countries were articulated with the Australia–China value chain for educational services early in the COVID-19 outbreak, when travelers from China could enter Australia only via stopovers in third countries. The routes, advertised by migration brokers, allowed Australia to externalize risk of infection while profiting from international student mobility.

Tourist mobilities helped COVID-19 become a global pandemic. This commentary argues that mobilities perspectives are vital to understanding the impacts of COVID-19 on global tourism. It assists scholars and policy-makers in two ways: by demonstrating how tourism is implicated in political issues heightened by the pandemic, and by advancing research on low carbon tourist mobilities.

Drawing on non-representational theories in geography and beyond, this commentary provides an autoethnographic account of the material and spatial dimensions of the law as well as its effects and affects on bodies in-between two countries, Italy and Finland, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bringing the political geography of tourism to bear on responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this commentary reveals how the geopolitical anxieties of tourism are mediated by historical geographies of race as well as contemporary geoeconomic relations and the broader pivot to the Asia-Pacific region.

COVID-19 is influencing how people engage with one another in geographic space. Stay-at-home orders and social distancing have reduced people’s bodily presences and social interactions in public spaces. Revisiting classical behavioral geography, this commentary explores the perception and engagement of geographic space among residents in the downtown core of a large metropolitan region in Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A defining feature of capitalism has been its ‘annihilation of space by time’ in the constant reduction of geographical barriers to rapid exchange. Overviewing how the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown has triggered a financial crisis staunched only by massive government bailouts, this commentary points to a need to orient analysis to the annihilation of time by space.

In this commentary, we examine the fashion industry’s early responses to COVID-19. Looking across fashion’s global production networks, we argue the fashion industry’s response has been rapid, yet highly inequitable, reflecting—and further entrenching—existing inequalities in the industry.

The economic fallout from COVID-19 has precipitated a crisis in global supply chains. The lockdown of consumers worldwide has triggered a fall in demand that has so far led to the dismissal of up to one-third of Cambodia’s garment sector workforce. Though the pandemic is exceptional, this is a crisis rooted in the exemplary rather than extraordinary hyper-precarity of workers in global industry. Here, I argue that COVID-19 spotlights the elusive ‘dark sides’ of global production in economic geography, revealing the necrocapitalist logics of supply chains.

The ride-hailing giant Uber has long circumvented labour regulations and commodified its drivers’ labour by existing at the conjuncture of multiple geographies – being simultaneously embedded and disembedded from the places where it operates. In this commentary, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has destabilised Uber’s ‘conjunctural’ existence and forced the company to become more embedded in the locations where it operates, bringing about a – perhaps temporary – turn towards the decommodification of its drivers’ labour.

COVID-19 has fundamentally changed workplace geographies with large proportions of people working at home during the ‘Great Lockdown’. This commentary argues that working at home has emerged as a key policy response and one in which inequalities are embedded. We outline the nature of these social and spatial inequalities by examining existing evidence and data for the Global North, and consider some of the economic and policy challenges ahead.

This commentary focuses on the relationship between extensive forms of urbanization and emerging infectious disease, using empirical examples from the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, it examines the role of shifting urban-ecological relationships, infrastructures, and governance dynamics in both giving rise to, and mitigating, the impact of infectious disease outbreaks.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposes countries and people in sub-Saharan Africa to severe risks because of structural global inequalities. There is a simultaneous risk of the use of public health action to enact oppressive governance policies, which is happening in response to COVID-19 in many countries. In this commentary, we use the example of 20th-century pandemic control in pre-apartheid South Africa to illustrate how public health crises can engender oppressive social, economic, and spatial transformations.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis offers a chance for urban scholars to play an even more explicit role in shaping ‘global urban governance’. Recognizing this international political realm, and the fundamental role that information exchange plays within it, urban studies can help drive a more progressive and inclusive global urban imagination.

The coronavirus pandemic is opening up a space for housing advocates and scholars to push for reforms to the private rental sector. Yet, we argue the Australian government has shown little commitment to addressing long-term, structural housing issues. Temporary reform will not lead to a new or more socially just housing system in the long-term—a new housing normal—without a significant and nation-wide tenant campaign. Like others, we are working together on campaigns such as this, but we are conscious that the government is likely to revert back to their old housing habits.

The afterlives of slavery and colonialism have haunted ruralities in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero, Mexico, during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Engaging with rural geographic scholarship, this commentary unpacks how these afterlives have shaped racialised development, negatively impacting the quality of life of Costa Chica’s human and nonhuman life.

This commentary examines the role of the ‘selfie’ as central to the teleological management of the COVID-19 crisis in India. It suggests that the incorporation of the self(ie) within the technologies of quarantine apps is a simulacrum of intimate surveillance that seeks to experiment in the present in order to extend its reach into the visual governance of intimate domesticity in the future.

COVID-19 has generated interest in the potential of urban robotics and automation to manage and police physical distancing and quarantine. This commentary examines the intersection between COVID-19 management strategies and the technological affordances of robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence (AI) in urban pandemic control. Examples from China illustrate the possibilities for urban robotics and automation in a new era of urban bio-(in)security.

This commentary examines the COVID-19 pandemic as a moment of strategic advancement for digital platforms. Focusing on the redeployment of Google Maps data for tracking adherence to mobility restrictions, I argue that demonstrating such ‘public value’ uses of Google’s vast geolocation and behavioral data forms part of a larger effort to strengthen their economic and political position in the face of two existential threats—declining advertising revenues and platform regulation.

Universities have transitioned to online education in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. This transition mobilizes the technological utopian imaginary that digital technologies can rescue populations from the disease. It also raises the risk of deepening neoliberal educational reforms and, by extension, poses a threat to democracy itself. This commentary explores this risk and suggests ways to resist the resulting neoliberalization of education that it could entail.

This commentary reflects upon my experiences modelling epidemics from a geographical perspective. In particular, I consider different approaches to the modelling of epidemics and other forms of data analysis relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic within a geographical context, especially with respect to the need for ‘just in time’ policy-relevant research.

This commentary describes the rapid development of a COVID-19 data dashboard utilising existing Urban Observatory Internet of Things (IoT) data and analytics infrastructure. Existing data capture systems were rapidly repurposed to provide real-time insights into the impacts of lockdown policy on urban governance.

The dashboard is the most striking cultural artefact of the current coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. It reveals the fraught pandemic politics which are centred around territorial approaches on the scale of the state rather than international cooperation, democratic liberation, and local care. The dashboard is a biopolitical technology of anxiety, prompting national states of emergency. This narrow approach to framing the COVID-19 crisis is rooted in military-style pandemic preparedness planning that became fashionable in the 21st century. However, there is mounting evidence that this approach does not adequately address the uneven and unjust geographies of the present.

A proliferation of web-based maps have appeared depicting many different aspects of the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). In this commentary, we consider the usage of web-based mapping during the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that web maps have been widely misused for delivering public information on this fast moving, epidemiologically complex, and geographically unbounded process.

This commentary argues that visualisations of COVID-19 transmission and mortality map out possible futures. It outlines a navigational approach to such mappings which interrogates their role in guiding anticipatory actions that are shaping COVID-19’s emerging geographies.

Conspiracy theories have proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide an explanation for uncontrollable circumstances. Most conspiratorial explanations often ascribe disease to foreigners or as a result of deliberate actions. Through mapping retweets that attribute COVID-19 to a bioweapon or a lab in China, I examine the geography behind a metonymic conspiracy theory.

Diagrams of COVID-19 inform individuals how to enact specific spatial, mobile, and bodily practices. This commentary employs a non-representational lens to show how certain aesthetics used in diagramming the virus may accentuate existing public feelings of uncertainty, emergency, or threat.

The rapidity of technological change underpins the centrality of genomes in framing COVID-19 problems and proposals for remedies. We counter such framings through a critical perspective that seeks to infuse more-than-human geographies into public health.

Stories of nature’s resurgence during quarantine have been dangerously conflated with an alarming narrative contending ‘Earth is healing, we are the virus’. Deploying a more-than-human perspective, we show how this discourse arises from biocultural decontextualisation that assumes nature has an inherent capacity to resurge. Such fetishisations distract from the need for urgent environmental action and obscure what resurgence actually is: a multispecies endeavour requiring cultivation and nurture.