Paper short abstract:

Covid-19 has made vivid the importance of social infrastructures to health policy. We propose that ethnographic methods that take the borough as the focus of study, with attention to neighbourhood, street and virtual spaces, are best suited to examine these infrastructures and propose interventions.

Paper long abstract:

Public health and other policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have extended the ongoing securitisation of state and communities. Beyond a narrow legal sense, a broader ‘state of exception’ has emerged as the implementation of such policies converge with – and galvanise – new forms of mutuality and reflections on social relationality. Such a state, this paper suggests, lends itself to reconfigurations and, necessarily, reconceptualisations of ‘community’. In this moment of reflection and the remaking of social relations, the paper illustrates how ethnographic methods provide the tools required to render visible and make vivid the layered and multidimensional interactions of ‘social infrastructures’ (Bear et al. 2021) at the interface of kinship networks, diverse communities and VCS groups, local government and the state. Second, the paper argues for the merits of placing Local Authority districts (‘the borough’) at the centre of ethnographic investigations. This level and scale of analysis is required in order to reveal the fragile relational networks that crosscut (in)formal care relations, as well as their articulation with broader state policies that inform localised political and socio-economic histories and realities. Third, the paper suggests that an ethnographic focus on the borough requires and enables, rather than forecloses, close-up examinations of the neighbourhood, street and virtual spaces, which can provide nuance to recent discussions about place and spatial relations. Fourth, a collaborative ethnographic approach can provide discrete, stand-alone studies of particular boroughs while opening up possibilities for comparison and the ‘scaling up’ of analysis for broader policy recommendations and interventions.