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- Convenors:
-
Alexandra Ciocanel
(Independed Researcher)
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (University of Manchester)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Starting from the question "What role does time play in the attribution of (ir)responsibility within crisis?", we invite contributions that look at various types of crises - economic, medical, political - in an attempt to critically engage with the concept of crisis and its temporal reasonings.
Long Abstract:
This panel explores the temporal dimensions of assigning (ir)responsibility within crises. Crises are often surrounded by attempts to make someone accountable either for their generation or for their bad management, constructing failure around the question 'What went wrong?'. This usually comes along a forward/backward temporal reasoning in an attempt to contain uncertainty and establish some sense of order. Retrospectively, blame can be assigned through claiming a lack of preparedness or its faulty implementation as in the case of Covid 19 crisis, or through critiquing speculation in economic crises. In the present, various actors may be held accountable for not acting with urgency or in a timely way, as in humanitarian crises. Scrutinizing the future, blame might be assigned through criticizing an incapability to act now for the future, as in climate change calls to act for future generations, pointing to a notion of kairos in relation to crisis. This panel invites critical reflections on financial, humanitarian, climate, medical (e.g. pandemics), and other crises starting from questions such as: What temporal horizons are at play when assigning blame and responsibility in crisis? How does the unfolding of events through time in a crisis shift the attribution of responsibility between different actors? How are disruptions of temporal experiences in crisis explained by different patterns of finger blaming? What temporal affects surround the attribution of (ir)responsibility within crises and failures? What new modes of responsibility can emerge and how are they related to persistence and change in social systems?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper investigates older people’s emotions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination. Utilising in-depth interviews in Australia, it focuses on how lived realities and conceptions of fear, risk, and responsibility inform affective attitudes to vaccination and ageing in the current crisis.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we investigate older people’s and aged care workers’ emotions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccination. We draw on in-depth interviews from a large project on COVID-19 and vaccination in Perth, Western Australia. The project aims to uncover shared understandings about the COVID-19 crisis and vaccination, examining and informing vaccine roll out. Previous vaccination campaigns have been heavily impacted by public fears about safety (e.g., the H1N1 vaccine rollout in France), and we seek to understand these feelings in the context of the current pandemic.
We analyse interviews with people aged 65 and over as well as workers in the aged care sector. We draw on theories and conceptualisations of risk, responsibility, age, and emotions—including fear—from anthropology, sociology, public health, and political science. A key focus is on people’s lived realities throughout the pandemic, and how these inform feelings about as well as anticipated and actual experiences of vaccination against COVID-19, including for people deemed ‘high risk’ because of their age or work. Of particular interest is how emotions and vaccination views are informed by the large proportion of COVID-19-related infections and deaths in Australian aged care settings. Our study also provides insights into how people conceive of risk and responsibility in terms of both vaccination and the virus, in a context (Western Australia) where there has been little community transmission since the crisis began.
Paper short abstract:
Between governmental measures for COVID-19 and Constitutional Court’s decisions delegitimizing such measures in Romania, anti-vax actors aim to instil resistance to medical expertise and political decisions. Online narratives link past, present and plausible futures to defy regulations.
Paper long abstract:
The late modern society has placed a great emphasis on responsibility and accountability as values that should govern social conduct during crises. Recent events caused by the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted social life, leaving us prey to the uncertainty. Health risks are increasingly pressing, and predictions regarding the availability of an anti-coronavirus vaccine are rather discouraging. Under these circumstances, anti-vaccination actors try to assign responsibility by denouncing experts’ manipulation of information, governmental policies of surveillance and control, and the politically and commercially profitable haste of the current process of developing the vaccine. Through a content analysis of Facebook posts from a Romanian anti-vaccination page, I discuss the role of imagined futures in justifying anti-vaccination stances and assigning responsibility for the management of the COVID-19 crisis. As opposing mandatory vaccination in particular and official medical expertise in general are positioned both as an individual act and a political act, its meaning is sustained in a narrative that links past, present, and plausible futures. I observe a shift in discursive strategies made by users during 2020, after the Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional the governmental measures for managing the pandemic. I discuss the role of this shift in anti-vaccination and anti-coronavirus instigations and also in valuing the political efficacy of resistance to official medical expertise.
Paper short abstract:
The social interpretation of the Covid disorder has become increasingly polarized. There are diverging futures, parallel histories, and contrasting versions of the present. Time work is essential for observing the social construction of bifurcated realities.
Paper long abstract:
The social interpretation of the Covid disorder has become increasingly polarized. Argumentative time work (Ciocănel, Rughiniș, and Flaherty 2020) plays an important role in the social construction of contrasting versions of reality and attributions of causality, responsibility, and blame. There are diverging futures: one marked by the uncertainties of coronavirus-related disease and long-term disability, another marked by risks of elites capturing society, through a “Great Reset” of capitalist organization; one energized by hopes in vaccination, another resisting a rushed vaccination campaign that is seen as the ultimate goal of the “plandemic”; one projecting death at unprecedented scale, another projecting herd immunity. There are alternative pasts: one in which we are repeating the mistakes and suffering the fate of the Spanish Flu, another in which we are continuing a tendency of state subjugation to globalization and manipulation from global elites. There are also diverging definitions of the present situation. In one, we are fighting a deadly, highly contagious virus, while in another an illness similar to the seasonal flu is weaponized to infringe on individual freedoms. In one the worst is yet to come, in another we have rounded the corner and we have already vanquished the pandemic. The present in which thousands of people are dying daily from the pandemic co-exists with a present with no real Covid deaths, but just manipulation of evidence. Time work is essential for observing the ongoing social construction of bifurcated realities.
Paper short abstract:
In governing Covid-19 different temporalities are at play with important consequences for public values in decision-making and shared responsibility within layered governance. The dominant flash time-logic makes different values seem irreconcilable and prevents intelligent sharing of responsibility.
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes the results of an anthropological study of decision-making within the Covid-19 crisis, in one ‘safety region’ – the organization responsible for crises and disaster control – in an urban region in the Netherlands. The first author conducted non-participatory observations of crisis-meetings starting March 2020 and proceeding to this day, as well as interviews with key actors. Being fully embedded gives us the unique opportunity to see how Covid-19 crisis management unfolds.
We highlight that in the regional governance of the Covid-19 crisis different temporalities are at play. We identify a dominant flash time-logic which is the logic of firefighting, of acting now with limited knowledge. In addition, a holistic time-logic in which there is space for nuance and validation of knowledge plays a marginal role. These different temporalities have important consequences for the public values that feature in decision-making. We show how the dominant temporality of a flash time-logic prioritizes safety as the most important value, moving other values such as (public) accountability, democracy and social-economic values to the background. Moreover, the time logics also impact the way responsibility is shared within the layered governance arrangement in which the security region operates. The dominant use of a flash time-logic makes different public values seem irreconcilable and prevents an intelligent sharing of responsibility. As Covid-19 is here to stay with us for a longer time we propose a shift towards the holistic time logic in order to move towards adaptive governance with room for balancing different public values.