اقرأ هذا باللغة العربية
By Mariam Daher, Mayssa Jallad, Nikolay Mintchev & Elisabetta Pietrostefani
The RELIEF Centre’s prosperity team is delighted to announce the launch of the Covid-19 diaries – a series of reflections about life in the context of the global pandemic that we are currently living through. As the pandemic hit, it changed our course of research in Lebanon. Travel plans had to be postponed until further notice because of lockdown regulations; fieldwork and research activities that the team had planned on the ground could no longer take place as envisaged; team workshops and assignments had to be moved online wherever possible. As we became physically fixed in the confines of our homes, our working lives moved to the realm of virtual online communication.
The impact of the pandemic, however, extends beyond work. In fact, it affects all spheres of life from personal health and wellbeing, to livelihoods, social connections, political engagements, and cultural activities to name just a few. Different types of infrastructures – from roads and sidewalks, to housing and internet connectivity – change their role and relevance in our lives. Our imaginations begin to shift in the way they envisage the past, present and future. The old routines of sociality become disrupted and reformed.
These transformations and disruptions present an opportunity to renew our thinking about prosperity. They allow us to produce new reflections and insights about what kinds of lives we want to live and what matters to us as individuals and as a community. At the broader societal level, countries across the world have seen the pandemic put pressure on economies, health care systems, and food supply chains among other things. In Lebanon, more specifically, the pandemic has come at a time of political and economic turmoil and exacerbated a crisis that was already underway.
The broader structural processes that the pandemic has instigated translate into specific types of lived realities for individuals, families and communities. This raises a number of important questions: how do we experience the structural dimensions of the ongoing changes in our daily lives? What are the challenges and anxieties, as well as hopes and aspirations, that are borne out of the bigger social and economic changes? What are the daily practices through which we manage our everyday lives in the context of the pandemic?
The Covid diaries present a glimpse of what daily life looks like as we move through the different stages of managing the pandemic, from full-on lockdown, to gradual relaxation of lockdown restrictions and return to ‘normal’ daily routines insofar as a return to an old ‘normal’ is at all possible.
Written by RELIEF’s citizen scientists in Lebanon, the diaries are portrayals of the vast range of experiences, thoughts, and activities that characterize everyday life. As readers of the diaries will undoubtedly notice, the attitudes and experiences depicted in the texts vary greatly among participants. While some write about their ability to make use of the lockdown to slow down, introspect, discover new hobbies, and enjoy their time at home, others talk about the opposite types of reactions – feelings of stress, anxiety and worry, resulting from the culmination of economic and social degradation as societies globally struggle to find coherent and efficient ways to deal with this pandemic. These diverse responses highlight the complex nature of our experiences in the present moment. As such, they invite us to reflect not only about the challenges we face, but also about the things we hold dear, and the things we can do to support the people and communities that we care about in these unprecedented times.
The Covid-19 diaries will be released on a rolling basis, so keep an eye on this space for future updates!
Photo by Nina Abdel Malak on Unsplash