#COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic
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Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 154, part 1, 2021, pp. 60–68. ISSN 0035-9173/21/010060-09 #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic Genevieve Bell College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Email: Genevieve.Bell@anu.edu.au Abstract On the 22 of March 2020, the Australian government announced Stage 1 restrictions in response nd to the global coronavirus pandemic (Johnson and Smale, 2020). Since then, numerous nation-wide measures have been implemented in an effort to control the rate of transmission and minimise the pandemic’s negative impact on the Australian people and the economy, ranging from lockdowns and stay-at-home orders to border closures and extensive contact tracing systems. As a growing body of research emerges exploring the efficacy and consequences of these strategies, there is an opportunity to reflect on their social and cultural impacts. In this paper I propose two analytical lenses through which to understand these impacts, framing the pandemic firstly as an (unplanned) social experiment which has transformed and illuminated our relationships with digital technologies, and secondly as a liminal moment and a shared set of social experiences. Introduction The pandemic has disrupted everything, O n 11 March 2020, the World Health from the global flow of goods and services Organization (WHO) declared to the actions that individuals can take in COVID-19 a global pandemic; that is, there their daily lives. The estimated economic was the worldwide spread of a new disease. impact on both Australia and the world The last such declaration had been made on at large is significant, with growing unem- June 11, 2009, with “swine flu,” or the H1N1 ployment and uncertainty about the future influenza virus. That declaration, in turn, of the globalised economy, and with some drew on lessons learnt from the SARS out- countries expected to enter a recession in the break in 2002. Yet very little of the world’s next year. Throughout the first year of the experience of the 2009 pandemic, or indeed pandemic, governments all over the world the various outbreaks of SARS (2002– enacted a range of measures to mitigate and 2004), MERS (2012), and Ebola (2014–2016) control the impact of COVID-19, including would prepare us for what would happen border closures, travel restrictions, stay-at- next — though the blueprint for how to home orders, economic stimulus packages, handle the COVID-19 pandemic owes much and wide-sweeping public health measures, to prior outbreak management, including including contract tracing technologies and quarantines, border closures and selective processes, mandatory masks, and quarantines. quarantining. The WHO’s 2020 declaration Many of these measures were enacted repeat- triggered action at a speed and scale that edly, as the virus spread and mutated and as was new and startling. our social systems attempted to adapt and 60
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic manage in response. Strategies around con- In Australia, our first stay-at-home tainment, management, and elimination have orders came in effect late March, when the been adopted, rejected, or adopted anew, and Australian government announced that the complexities of mass vaccination cam- all Australians were to stay home, and we paigns have roiled many nation states. would, at a nation-wide level, attempt to Nearly a year after COVID-19 was first “flatten the curve” (Johnson & Smale, 2020). declared a pandemic, there have been over There were four categories of exceptions 114 million cases and over 2.5 million deaths to the stay-at-home mandate: health care; (WHO, 2021). The human toll and impact shopping for food and basic supplies; exer- will continue to unfold for years, touching cise; and essential jobs. The logic behind the everything from health to education and stay-at-home orders were two-fold: slow the employment; there remains little to no clear rates of transmission, and make it possible consensus about how or when this pandemic for the nationwide public health systems to might end, or about how daily life might prepare for a predicted inflow of patients. look in its aftermath. In early May, the co-ordination between There will be many accounts written the federal and state governments in Aus- about this period and about its conse- tralia gave way to a patchwork of responses quences. However, even now, as we remain and restrictions that have persisted ever in the midst of the pandemic, there is since, including state border closures, travel significant insight to be gained from the bans, and quarantines. These responses have ways in which we are experiencing it, col- included a variety of stay-at-home orders, lectively and individually. How we make ranging from short, sharp closures, “circuit sense of this moment, and how it might breakers’’ (Adelaide, November 2020; Perth, inform what comes next, in terms of new Brisbane, January 2021; Melbourne, Febru- practices, values and even rules, feels gen- ary 2021), to longer and more protracted erative. Likewise, an analysis of our passages restrictions, including an unprecedented through the pandemic could help illuminate 111-day stay-at-home order in Victoria possible opportunities for meaningful social, which, combined with a nightly curfew, political, institutional, and individual trans- restricted mobility, and border closures formations. (August–October 2020). As a result of these interventions and Australia and COVID-19 continued travel restrictions, border clo- By early April 2020, more than half the sures and aggressive public health measures, world’s population was in some form of Australia has recorded only 29,000 cases and state-sanctioned lock-down (Kaplan et al., a little over 900 deaths since the first case 2020; Sandford, 2020; Storrow, 2020; Woods, appeared in Australia in January of 2020 2020), and the use of stay-at-home orders (Australian Department of Health, 2021). and other forms of restrictions have contin- There will be much written about the eco- ued globally ever since, with some countries nomic impact and the various government closing their borders completely and others mechanisms implemented to ameliorate entering into the second and third periods the worst harms here in Australia. Likewise, of city, region and state-wide lockdowns. the social and cultural impacts which have 61
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic been far reaching, offer much upon which ment. It made more visible long-standing to reflect and learn. In this paper, I want to social and economic inequities, especially offer just two possible avenues of analysis of around gender (Johnston et al., 2020). What the social and cultural impacts here in Aus- quickly became clear was remote work was tralia: the pandemic as (unplanned) social more than just giving someone a webcam experiment; and the pandemic as liminal. on a laptop: it meant changing the nature of how an organisation functions, the purpose The pandemic as social experiment of meetings, and organisational processes The immediacy and scale of the various stay- and structures, including how new employ- at-home orders here in Australia created ees are on-boarded, and teams are cultivated. massive social change in a very short time. From the initial nationwide stay-at-home Online education orders in March 2020, to the various state Making online education successful is more and city restrictions, one way to think about than just putting your PowerPoint slides the pandemic is as a series of significant online or settling a student in front of a social experiments here in Australia. Of laptop. During the pandemic, the efficacy course, these “experiments” were unplanned, of online, digitally enhanced, and/or remote frequently ran without a control group, and education learning experiences has been were certainly not something to which we, tested with a range of student demograph- as participants, had anything resembling ics (from primary and secondary school to informed consent or an ability to decline to university, to professional training). Students participate. That said, there is much we can have encountered new forms of learning, and learn from the impact of the pandemic on the changes have revealed complex layers of our daily lives, and especially regarding the infrastructural, pedagogical, social, and famil- role of technology in our daily lives. The les- ial challenges, as well as reinforcing some of sons we could draw from this period might the oft-encountered challenges for regional help inform public policy, regulation, and and remote communities (Armour et al., standards, as well as future state, national 2020), and revealing new forms of tacit labour and private investments in everything from in the home as parents became teachers’ aides infrastructure to training. and technical support. Here are just five areas in outline, related to technology in our daily lives, we could Telehealth services choose to examine further: The pandemic has seen the Australian Gov- ernment introduce temporary measures to Remote work increase the scope of telehealth coverage The feasibility of remote working was under the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) abruptly tested in late March and early April to cover the entire population due to its of 2020, with organisations small and large effectiveness in triaging and monitoring transitioning to a remote workforce within COVID-19 cases — a quality already dem- days or weeks. This has created new ways to onstrated in countries such as Singapore and work, and tested underlying infrastructure, South Korea. An unforeseen consequence of technical literacy, and availability of equip- this has been greater insight into the poten- 62
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic tial benefits of telehealth, and it appears Data privacy that government moves to roll back these The trade-off between safety and privacy has measures are already meeting resistance become very real, with the need for rapid, from medical practitioners (Maguire, 2020; accurate contact tracing to help contain the Hunt, 2020; Seselja, 2020). After all, being spread of COVID-19, and the use of digi- able to see your doctor at the appointed tal technologies and data to help in those time without having to think about park- efforts (Bell, 2020; Bell et al., 2020). The ing or worrying about how you are going to public debate around the use and efficacy manage your children or how you are going of the COVIDSafe app made it clear that to get into the office seems like a positive issues of privacy, trust and data collection step. remain sensitive ones in Australia. The rapid proliferation of state-based, commercial and Online shopping and payments local check-in mechanisms have unfolded The closure of brick-and-mortar stores with considerably less debate around data driven by pandemic-related public health use, security and trust, but have nonethe- measures such as social distancing has been less continued to thrust these issues into accompanied by a rapid uptake in Australia’s the spotlight. The nascent debate about a traditionally laggard e-commerce industry, “vaccination passport” again proposes to with 5.2 million Australians shopping online bring these issues to the fore (Bell, 2020; in April 2020 — the highest number ever Hern, 2021). recorded at the time, and 31% higher than the 2019 average (Australia Post, 2020; Mor- From data collection to action: timer et al., 2020). This has put pressure on next steps? delivery systems and payments systems, and It is not yet clear which of these unintended raises questions about the future of certain experiments, and the many others that are kinds of physical spaces. This online shop- ongoing, will most profoundly change us, and ping boom has also created a wave of new which will fade in a post-pandemic recovery. data, unexpectedly impacting algorithms However, all these unplanned social experi- that help determine supply chains, goods, ments and their results are revelatory for and future purchases. how we might design a post-pandemic Aus- Australia is already well-known for its tralia. Clearly, during this period, we have high adoption rate of contactless “tap and experienced changes in how we use, think, go” payment methods, and COVID-19 has and feel about digital technologies. Are these only encouraged this trend by transforming trends and opportunities revealed during the contactless payment from a convenience to COVID-19 pandemic ones we could amplify a hygiene necessity. This continued move or accelerate, or that we could remediate and towards a cashless economy has catalysed fix for good? discussion about the operation and equity As with all good experiments, even the of our existing cashless infrastructure (Letts, unplanned ones, there comes a moment to 2020; Collett, 2020). move from data collection to action. While the pandemic is clearly still shaping Aus- tralian daily life, there are lessons we can 63
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic draw from the first year that could inform we, as humans, make passages through the both public policy and commercial activ- world. He was particularly interested in ity, especially regarding the importance of how such passages through time and space robust data, information and communica- could have a common ritual structure, and tion networks and equity of access to the what the nature of those structures might same. Likewise, it is again clear that the be. In articulating his theories around such availability of networks and equity of access rites of passage, he also articulated a time must also be accompanied by significant and space in between. He called this liminal, investment in the tools, processes, security, or liminality. He, and his followers, would and skills necessary to successfully utilise define it as having the quality of ambigu- those networks. ity or disorientation, the middle moment between what was and what will become The pandemic as a rite of passage (Turner, [1969] 2008: 94). He would also go During the arc of the pandemic so far, we on to write about the rites and rituals that have variously come out of homes, gone back both begin and end a period of liminality, into homes and closed, opened, reclosed, rites and rituals of separation and re-incor- and reopened all manner of social and com- poration (Van Gennep, [1960] 2019: 21). This mercial enterprises, as well as city, state and feels like one way to think about, or theorise, national borders. How would one start to our experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. talk about these experiences beyond the per- Liminality, as a way to describe the moment sonal narratives? Are there ways of thinking between moments and the places between about the pandemic as a structural social places, is a concept that seems to resonate moment? Perhaps our experiences of the with the Australian experience of the pan- pandemic could also be understood as a set demic (Bell, 2021). of shared social experiences, not just experi- This theoretical frame seems especially ments. Through this lens, we might reflect evocative now. Is one way to approach the on the pandemic as a journey, or as a way pandemic and to talk about its consequences we have occupied time and space over the to think about it as a liminal moment? And last twelve months, and in particular the if so, what are the pieces of that liminal- ways in which these experiences of time and ity? During this first year of the COVID-19 space are unlike those which came before pandemic, have certain spaces or times been (Bell, 2021).1 liminal, what work were they doing cultur- At the turn of the last century, the Bel- ally/socially, what work we are doing in gian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep them, and how have we transited in and out wrote about the ways in which differ- of them? Perhaps framing our experiences of ent cultures structure their movements the pandemic through this lens might offer through time and space ([1960] 2019): how a different kind of conversation. Six liminal frames 1 For many Australians, the feelings of ambiguity, My team and I went and looked at all the unfamiliarity and dislocation pre-date the COVID-19 pandemic, given that 70 to 80 per cent of the Aus- kinds of conversations people were having; tralian population were also impacted by drought, the formal pieces, the governmental pieces, bushfires, and smoke (Biddle et al., 2020). 64
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic the individual responses, and we saw the goods and services where they once did not outlines of six themes of this liminal stage. have to move quite like that, and in the move- These threads revolve around temporality, ments of people. Who has had to become a embodiment, intermediation, mobility, policer of these seams who wouldn’t have relationships and identity (for a further been otherwise — parents, health-care work- explication, see Bell, 2021). ers, retail staff, hospitality workers, soldiers, police? Some of those seams and instances Temporality of intermediation have been long invisible The destabilising of our shared understand- and are now starkly visible — state borders ing of time is an obvious characteristic of would be one obvious example, likewise food this COVID-19-induced liminal moment. supply changes. The notion of what moved For many, days blurred into each other,2 and what did not, and how those things likewise weeks and months. The contours moved and having to know where they came of time were flattened, and its cadence had from, is at least one form of intermediation new patterns: what once moved fast that that is now visible. Whether these seams and now moves slow, what once moved slow that movements will become invisible again later now moves fast. is complicated. Whether we can forget them again, doubly so. Presence and embodiment There have been transformations in ideas Mobility about presence and embodiment. At its The pandemic has been characterised by most straightforward, the physical became changing ideas about what could move, virtual. We have reimagined the physical, what should move, what should not move the virtual, the digital, and the analogue, but did anyway, and where we had fears and in so doing also challenged ideas of how about things moving. This involves regulating things do and do not move. After all, in this human movement, for example negotiating moment, certain forms of embodiment were the 25 kilometre border around Melbourne seen as being dangerous, a classic hallmark in the second lock-down (August 2020) and of liminality. Being present was seen as the restrictions on fly-in, fly-out workers in being dangerous and we have actively re/ Western Australia mines; restricting human calibrated our senses of our social selves to moment, through closing our national maintain “safe” distances. boundaries and thus redefining what it means to be an Australian living abroad who can Intermediation and services call Australia home but can’t physically come How things are being intermediated has home; and the movement of ideas rather been unexpectedly hyper-visible during the than bodies, where you might be part of a pandemic. We have had to both encounter global community you can only see through seams, borders and boundaries we had not a digital screen. These are not just questions previously seen, and then also manage them. of privilege and who is able to move, these This extended from the seams of the public are questions of positionality that feel as yet and the private to the (non-)movements of unresolved, but very complicated. 2 Hence, “Blursday” [Ed.] 65
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic There is also, in some ways, still an emerg- Identity ing science concerning a whole other set of Notions about personhood and identity, mobilities. An ongoing set of questions sur- who and what we are, have been hotly con- rounding how a virus moves, whether it is tested during this pandemic period: from the airborne and if so, what is a safe distance “weaponizing” of demographics — for exam- from others and how can we control certain ple, blaming millennials or claiming we are spaces, as well as how we imagine what it over protecting boomers, to the fraught use means to have an infected body, where they of “Karen” as a pejorative. The impact of this will move and how they will be treated sug- moment in time was felt unevenly, and that gests that this particular part of this liminal unevenness follows a set of well-rehearsed moment is deeply contested. social and cultural inequities. Women have so far borne the brunt of managing home Relationships schooling, and women’s careers were more In Australia during the early days of both precarious and have suffered as various parts the pandemic and the first lockdowns of the economy have been shuttered. What nationwide, there was a lot of borrowed state were you in — in a geographic sense, language about “we’re all in it together.” not an emotional one — has mattered too. That language started at a community level; That our experiences were so inflected by a grassroots statement from households our geographic locations suggests some very and communities wanting to articulate localised encounters with the liminal. Who a degree of communal activity that was we will be on the other side of this, as indi- admirable and distinctly Australian. The viduals, families, communities, as well as contradistinction between the broader consumers and citizens, is yet to be revealed. Australian experience of the pandemic and others — for instance the American experi- Exiting liminality ence — means the responsive relationship How and when this pandemic will end is between citizens and their elected officials unclear. We now have vaccines, but there are and their scientific and health advisors has many questions regarding their efficacy, lon- been on display almost daily. gevity and availability; for now, Australia’s Nonetheless, that language of relation- national borders remain (mostly) closed. So, ships, of “being in it together,” has become at least at one level, we are still, collectively, more complicated. Public health rules made in a liminal moment. This means we could it complicated be together when you had to choose to contemplate how we might exit constantly consider who your relatives were, it, and in this exiting, make deliberate deci- whom you were close to, who counted in sions. your “bubble” and who was in your house- Van Gennep, too, was interested in how hold. Similarly, our notions about what we exited liminality, changed by our passage constituted safe connectivity and safe con- through it. He was particularly interested in nection, as well as what it meant to be a rites of separation and rites of reincorpo- social creature all fluxed. ration — those things that individuals and 66
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales Bell — #COVIDTIMES: Social experiments, liminality and the COVID-19 pandemic groups did to signal the end of liminality References and the beginning of a new steady state. I Armour, D., Blackmore, J., Brown, N., Clinton, would argue that we were plunged into this J., Geelan, D., Martin, A., Miller, J., Mulcahy, liminal moment quite suddenly, but how M., Prestridge, S., Selwyn, N., Taylor-Guy, might we deliberately and thoughtfully P., Thomas, J., West, D., & Wilson, R. (2020). Learning outcomes for online versus in-class structure our exit/s? How will we exit this/ education Australian Academy of Science. these liminal moments — perhaps more https://www.science.org.au/covid19/learning- than once? What are the rites/rituals we will outcomes-online-vs-inclass-education need to do — individually? Collectively? As Bell, G. (2020, Apr 12). We need mass a community? Society? surveillance to fight COVID-19 — but it doesn’t have to be creepy. Technology Beginning again: looking forward Review, MIT. https://www.technologyreview. com/2020/04/12/999186/covid-19-contact- “Life itself means to separate and to be tracing-surveillance-data-privacy-anonymity/ reunited, to change form and condition, Bell, G. (2020). Pandemic passages: An to die and to be reborn. It is to act and anthropological account of life and liminality during COVID-19. Anthropology in Action, to cease, to wait and to rest, and then to 28(1), 79–84. begin acting again, but in a different way” Bell, G., Andrejevic, M., Barry, C., (Van Gennep, 1960). Christensen, H., Hjorth, L., Hornsey, One of the reasons to approach the analy- M., Jetten, J., Lawrence, C., Lazar, S., & Taylor, M. (n.d.). Motivators for use of the sis of the pandemic from this social-centric COVIDSafe app. Australian Academy of point of view is to provide an opportunity Science, Rapid Research Information Forum. to think about the opportunities as we exit Collett, J. (2020, May 26). Contactless the pandemic to (re)stabilise ourselves, our payments spurred by hygiene concerns. The communities, and our country in new and Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh. com.au/money/planning-and-budgeting/ different ways. Thus far, Australia has been contactless-payments-spurred-by-hygiene- fortunate in the global context of the pan- concerns-20200522-p54vh9.html demic, and our focus is shifting towards Coronavirus (COVID-19) current situation post-COVID recovery. While acknowledg- and case numbers. (2020). Australian ing that the pandemic is still at large, we Government Department of Health. https:// are already beginning to consider and plan www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/ novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/ for a post-COVID Australia. How might coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and- we do that and what will the roles for tech- case-numbers nology be in all of this? If things have been Hunt, G. (2020). Continuous care with destabilised and shaken up, would we want telehealth stage seven. Australian to stabilise them? And if so, how? Government Department of Health. https:// www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-greg- hunt-mp/media/continuous-care-with- telehealth-stage-seven Inside Australian Online Shopping. (2020). 2020 eCommerce Industry Report, Australia Post. 67
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