When This is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic
This week a book was released which I both co-edited and contributed to and which has been two years in the making. When This is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic is a volume combining a range of accounts from artists to poets, practitioners to academics. Our initial aim of the book was borne out of a need for commemoration but we cannot begin to address this without considering inequalities throughout the pandemic.
Each of the four editors had both personal and professional reasons for starting the project. I – like many – was (and still is) deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. When we first went into lockdown, we were shown the data every day, telling us the numbers of people who had the virus and of those who had died with COVID-19. Behind these numbers, I saw each and every person. I thought about their loved ones left behind, how many of them died alone without being able to say goodbye other than through a video screen. I thought about what happened to the bodies afterwards, how death rites would be impacted and how the bereaved would cope without hugs and face to face social support. Then my grandmother died. She had overcome COVID-19 in the way that she was testing negative. But I heard her lungs on the day she died. I know. And so, I became even more consumed with questions of the COVID-19 dead, with/of debates. I was angry at the narratives surrounding the disposability of people’s lives, at people telling me ‘she had a good innings’. It was personal now.
I now understood the impact of not being able to hug my grandpa at my grandmother’s funeral, and how ‘normal’ cultural practices surrounding death were disturbed. My grandmother loved singing in choirs and one of the traumatic parts of our bereavement was not being able to sing at her funeral as she would have wanted and how we wanted to remember her. Lucy Easthope, a disaster planner and one of my co-authors speaks of her frustrations in this regard:
“we’ve done something incredibly traumatising to the families that is potentially bigger than the bereavement itself. In any disaster you should still allow people to see the dead. It is a gross inhumanity of bad planning that people couldn’t’t visit the sick, view the deceased’s bodies, or attend funerals. Had we had a more liberal PPE stockpile we could have done this. PPE is about accessing your loved ones and dead ones, it is not just about medical professionals.”
The book is divided into five parts, each addressing a different theme all of which I argue are relevant to criminologists and each part including personal, professional, and artistic reflections of the themes. Part 1 considered racialised, classed, and gendered identities which impacted on inequality throughout the pandemic, asking if we really are in this together? In this section former children’s laureate Michael Rosen draws from his experience of having COVID-19 and being hospitalised in intensive care for 48 days. He writes about disposability and eugenics-style narratives of herd immunity, highlighting the contrast between such discourse and the way he was treated in the NHS: with great care and like any other patient.
The second part of the book considers how already existing inequalities have been intensified throughout the pandemic in policing, law and immigration. Our very own @paulsquaredd contributed a chapter on the policing of protests during the pandemic, drawing on race in the Black Lives Matter protests and gender in relation to Sarah Everard. As my colleagues and students might expect, I wrote about the treatment of asylum seekers during the initial lockdown periods with a focus on the shift from secure and safe self-contained housing to accommodating people seeking safety in hotels.
Part three considers what happens to the dead in a pandemic and draws heavily on the experiences of crematoria and funerary workers and how they cared for the dead in such difficult circumstances. This part of the book sheds light on some of the forgotten essential workers during the pandemic. During lockdown, we clapped for NHS workers, empathised with supermarket workers and applauded other visible workers but there were many less visible people doing valuable unseen work such as caring for the dead. When it comes to death society often thinks of those who cared for them when they were alive and the bereaved who were left to the exclusion of those who look after the body. The section provides some insight into these experiences.
Moving through the journey of life and death in a pandemic, the fourth section focusses on questions of commemoration, a process which is both personal and political. At the heart of commemorating the COVID-19 dead in the UK is the National COVID Memorial Wall, situated facing parliament and sat below St Thomas’ hospital. In a poignant and political physical space, the unofficial wall cared for by bereaved family members such as Fran Hall recognises and remembers the COVID dead. If you haven’t visited the wall yet, there will be a candlelit vigil walk next Wednesday, 29th March at 7pm and those readers who live further afield can digitally walk the wall here, listening to the stories of bereaved family members as you navigate the 150,837 painted hearts.
The final part of the book both reflects on the mistakes made and looks forward to what comes next. Can we do better in the next pandemic? Emergency planner Matt Hogan presents a critical view on the handling of the pandemic, returning to the refrain, ‘emergency planning is dead. Long live emergency planning’. Lucy Easthope is equally critical, developing what she has discussed in her book When the Dust Settles to consider how and what lessons we can learn from the management of the pandemic. Lucy calls out for activism, concluding with calls to ‘Give them hell’ and ‘to shout a little louder’.
Concluding in his afterword, Gary Younge suggests this is ‘teachable moment’, but will we learn?
When This is Over: Reflections on an Unequal Pandemic is published by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press. The book can be purchased directly from the publisher who offer a 25% discount when subscribing. It can also be purchased from all good book shops and Amazon.
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An inspirational note to students on the issue of students’ non-engagement in Universities
I am not a motivational speaker, nor claim to have been inducted into the motivational speaker’s hall of fame. However, my choice to write about this blog stems from some of the challenges being faced by students that I have observed in the last couple of months. This is an inspirational blog for students and not so much about the issues of laziness in studies and so on. The aim here is to try to guide students on how they can fight through some of the challenges they are going through and be better achievers. As an educator, I owe it a duty to myself to offer advice and guidance to my students wherever necessary – in the hope that they can benefit sufficiently from the experiences that university life brings them. Remember my first point, I am not a motivational speaker, and so the recommendations that I present here are not exhaustive but brief and straight to the point.
In this post-pandemic era, several academics have drawn attention to the general lack of engagement of students in their various universities, and some colleagues have written and spoken about this issue on different platforms and forums. Some academics and students, none I know, often conclude and sum up the problem as ‘mere laziness’. While I do not disagree entirely with them in some cases, I wish to reflect on some of my observations with students from different universities. In these dialogues, my aim was to know their views on the general lack of engagement with their studies and to pick their brains on why some students struggle to attend classes. Many issues have been raised, but I will attempt to sum them up into three categories.
Firstly, one of the key issues that some students have raised is the impact of the pandemic and the need to bring back remote learning. Undoubtedly, COVID-19 messed us all up, and I get it. It was a painful period of uncertainty and a period where academic achievements dropped almost to their lowest across many countries. Online collaborate, and other online classes made life really easy for many students to the point where students could turn up to their 9 am online class under their duvet just a few minutes before the start of the class. The obligation to complete workshop reading was minimal because students could easily fake a network connection glitch and sign out when called to answer a question. There was also no obligation (in some cases) to turn on your camera or mic – because the famous phrase ‘my mic isn’t working’ was not too far away. These examples may seem inconsequential, but they help us understand some foundational problems affecting students’ motivation to engage with their studies.
We should also not forget that the need to queue up for trains at 7 am, where you have people breathing down your neck during the expensive peak time or rush hour period to meet a 9 am lecture, was reduced to the lockdown rules. This life has led to what I call the ‘soft life’. The soft life of having things done at your own time, in your bed, and at your own pace. To a large extent, the ‘soft life’ of remote learning has made it really difficult for some students to readjust to real life and to fire up their motivations to engage with their studies. My recommendation is that students start fighting through this soft life because the real-life upon graduation is not particularly soft, and the labour market (as some of you may be aware) is particularly fierce in its competition.
The second issue here is the problem of finance and the current cost-of-living crisis. I will not go into specific details because we are all feeling the heat of the current austerity, but the result of the current cost of living crises, such as the rise in transportation fares, has been raised as one of the reasons why students do not turn up to classes. We all know that the austere situation of price hikes is being experienced by many of us today. As a result, we are witnessing several strike actions across the country. From teachers to train drivers and from hospital workers to bus drivers, hundreds of thousands of workers are calling for changes in their pay schemes, working conditions and so on. Students are also suffering from these crises too, and it becomes even more compounded for students with dependents.
We can all agree that studying under harsh financial conditions can increase anxiety and reduce motivation to engage in university. These, coupled with family commitments and health challenges, are a recipe for discouragement and demoralisation. In managing this problem in academic studies, one of the key recommendations is for students to identify the support services available to them in their various institutions. Get in touch with your lecturers and update them on your predicament. Don’t ‘ghost’ on your PATs; speak to your academic advisers and other services available to you as you deem fit. Keeping your problems to yourself will only intensify anxiety. After all, a problem well stated is a problem half solved.
Another overarching narrative in my dialogue with some students reflects the general feeling of not wanting to go to university because of a lack of belonging to the campus or the course/module. Some students have noted higher confidence levels in peer learning and that their inability to establish a strong relationship with friends on campus or in classrooms has made it difficult for them to engage. When it relates to in-class workshop exercises, minimal students attend class, thus restricting peer learning. I once heard, ‘why do I need to attend when it’s only going to be 3 of us in the class’. Again, very many examples have been raised in my dialogues, but what is important here is for students to recognise some of the benefits of this and to use it to their advantage instead of taking it as a reason not to engage. One example is that such situations can provide a more ‘personable atmosphere’ where you can clarify burning issues relating to the module. It can also help with attention, and it can help build confidence.
Gnerally, non-engagement with studies has some implications for later years. Gone were the days when the probability of getting a job was relatively high upon completing university degree. However, in recent times, the competition in the labour market has become so stiff that those with a 2.1 or 1st-class degree sometimes find it hard to secure a job – particularly where experience is limited. Making informed decisions, being autonomous in your education and taking responsibility for your education will assist in dealing with quite a lot of challenges in later years. Remember the saying, if life throws lemons at you, make lemonade out of it. So keep on striving.
Overall, anxiety, stress and demoralisation reduce work productivity and social functioning. We are in a period where we, as a society, need each other more than ever. People are struggling and going through different crises, and as a people, the least we can do is to be kind to individuals and alley their fears whenever possible and necessary. Kindness here becomes the goal.
I hope you find strength for those going through other issues, such as ill health and other challenges that are beyond their control! Happy Weekend!
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Thinking about ‘Thoughts from the Criminology Team’
This is the sixth anniversary of the blog, and I am proud to have been a contributor since its inception. Although, initially I only somewhat reluctantly agreed to contribute. I dislike social media with a passion, something to be avoided at all costs, and I saw this as yet more intrusive social media. A dinosaur, perhaps, but one that has years of experience in the art of self-preservation. Open up to the world and you risk ridicule and all sorts of backlash and yet, the blog somehow felt and feels different. It is not a university blog, it is our team;s blog, it belongs to us and the contributors. What is written are our own personal opinions and observations, it is not edited, save for the usual grammar and spelling faux pas, it is not restricted in any way save that there is an inherent intolerance within the team for anything that may cause offence or hurt. Government, management, organisations, structures, and processes are fair game for criticism or indeed ridicule, including at times our own organisation. And our own organisation deserves some credit for not attempting to censure our points of view. Attempts at bringing the blog into the university fold have been strongly resisted and for good reason, it is our blog, it does not belong to an institution.
As contributors, and there are many, students, academics and guests, we have all been able to write about topics that matter to us. The blog it seems to me serves no one purpose other than to allow people space to write and to air their views in a safe environment. For me it serves as a cathartic release. A chance to tell the world (well at least those that read the blog) my views on diverse topics, not just my views but my feelings, there is something of me that goes into most of my writing. It gives me an opportunity to have fun as well, to play with words, to poke fun without being too obvious. It has allowed us all to pursue issues around social injustices, to question the country, indeed the world in which we live. And it has allowed writers to provide us all with an insight into what goes on elsewhere in the world, a departure from a western colonial viewpoint. I think, as blogs go it is a pretty good blog or collection of blogs, I’m not sure of the terminology but it is certainly better than being a twit on Twitter.
Thoughts from the criminology team 