Geographies of COVID‐19

Abstract

Photo credit: Fusion Medical Animation. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 has precipitated profound social, economic, and political disruptions and, at the same time, has exacerbating existing geopolitical and socio-spatial disparities. In this editorial, we summarise a diverse range of works on the emergent geographies of COVID-19 that have been published in Geographical Research and are now assembled as a virtual special section. Employing several methodologies and concepts, that expansive body of work provides a way to engage with the pandemic from a range of geographical perspectives. As a collection, it includes work on the geographies of COVID-19 mobilities, COVID-19 governance measures, the urban and material geographies of COVID-19, the spatio-temporalities of COVID-19, and the new spaces of learning and pedagogic practice that have characterised responses to the pandemic. David Bissell’s (2021) essay asks a series of questions about how we make sense of place during COVID-19. Drawing on fascinating work by Torsten Hägerstrand (1970), Bissell explores the circular micro-mobilities of neighbourhood life during the pandemic. In developing the idea of a looped sense of place, Bissell uses Hägerstrand’s visualisations of space–time to rethink how our sense of place was formed and reformed as we looped through and between local places. Moving to a capsular sense of place, Bissell shows how freedom and (in)mobility operated during the pandemic. Mobility and freedom are often thought about together. For example, the freedom (or not) to be mobile across international borders is connected to and mediated by racialised, classed, and other identities. Yet, Bissell asks how immobility and an ability to work from home and stay at home might operate as a form of freedom that is also racialised and classed. In order for us “to be still,” he writes, “we require mobility from others,” often low-income gig-economy workers (p. 155). For Bissell, an uncertain sense of place shifts our attention onto an inability to come to terms with and understand the sheer complexity of COVID-19 and the ways in which it has restructured our sense of place. Pushing beyond scientific understandings, such as those provided by epidemiologists and public health experts, this notion of place plays out at the intersections of nature and culture, rich and poor, material cultures and urban atmospheres, and the discursive and more-than-discursive. Then pulling the essay together, Bissell’s (neo)geographical sense of place returns us to the core objectives of geography and the power and utility of the geographical imagination—namely, that geographers are well placed to understand the complexity of COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the mobilities discussed by Bissell (2021) were, of course, underwritten by telecommunications infrastructures and access to digital technologies. Denham’s (2021) essay discusses the radical shift to telecommuting as one modality of working from home during COVID-19. The geographical sensibility in this work is located at the material intersections of Australia’s major cities and their regional counterparts, as well as in the built-form discrepancies that exist across these cities. By reference to the idea of counterurbanisation, Denham considers both outmigration from major cities enabled by telecommunications infrastructures and the different housing and urban densities of major metropolitan centres, nonmetropolitan areas, and the peri-urban fringe. Nonmetropolitan areas and the peri-urban area, he suggests, were appealing at the height of the pandemic because “housing is less dense and infection rates are lower” (p. 514). In the backend of the essay, Denham turns to policy implications arising from the acceleration of both telecommuting and physical mobility during the pandemic, and poses an interesting question: did telecommunications infrastructure enable a digital expansion of metropolitan areas or the growth of nonmetropolitan areas, or some combination of the two? Considering the geographical scope and digital reach of international student mobility, Sidhu et al. (2021) discuss changes and public narratives affecting student mobility in Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. The practical context for their analysis is the strict bordering work that was enforced in each country at both a national level—that is, via international border controls, and local levels—that is, via lockdowns. New Zealand implemented a hard lockdown approach. Australia closed international and state and territory borders and limited non-essential services and physical gatherings. Singapore introduced a “circuit breaker” approach, with partial lockdowns measures and the closure of non-essential workplaces. Digital infrastructures were key to each case and amplified the bordering and mobility practices used to manage different student populations. Of central concern in the article is the need to think more carefully about how the physical and digital mobilities that were trialled during the pandemic might either “resurrect what came before the pandemic” (p. 313) in terms of bordering and ordering of student bodies (singular and collective) or usher in or accelerate new digital teaching practices that could advance commercialisation agendas being enacted in universities. The authors use the idea of governing the new space–times of student and university life to highlight a suite of challenges for the post-COVID world. Two key observations follow. The first is that COVID-19 exposed the hidden digital architecture that is increasingly underwriting the contemporary higher education system in all three countries. This hidden digital architecture can extend the university in time and space, but it might potentially undermine the central mission of universities too. The second, then, is that these new socio-technical learning environments can “reshape the spaces and subjects of higher education—student learning experiences, the role of research, relationships between students and faculty, and the public role of the academy” (p. 318). Sidhu et al. (2021) find that these new (and old) digital infrastructures could drive major structural changes in higher education. Expanding this picture of geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic, Praharaj and Han (2022) detail the complex interactions between human mobility and the spread and incidence of the COVID virus. The authors use both state and crowd-sourced mobility data and Google map data to develop a novel statistical model in the context of the initial Indian COVID response. They find that “mobility patterns related to retail and recreation and grocery and pharmacy are significantly associated with the incidence of COVID-19” (p. 22). Their research points to wider socio-economic dynamics that might be revealed by mobility data. As Praharaj and Han (2022) highlight, “the spread of the coronavirus is closely related to the frequency of short-distance travel for daily needs” (p. 24). Importantly, the work provides further evidence of the need for more geographically sensitive responses to the pandemic; responses that are better informed analyses located at the intersections of the spread of the virus and wider socio-spatial conditions. A key theme emerging in the papers in Geographical Research on COVID-19 concerns questions of urban governance, place, and space. Recio et al. (2021) take us to the megacities of the Global South where, the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic have been pronounced. Recio et al. analyse the effects of the pandemic on the urban poor in three capital cities: Delhi in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Manila in the Philippines. In comparison with the depiction of COVID responses in many cities in the Global North, charactarised by high levels of government intervention and varied levels of support from citizens, this cross-city analysis from the Global South shows how limited government intervention was experienced by the urban poor in these cities. Their work is an important corrective for much of the commentary on COVID-19 from the Global North. In Delhi, Dhaka, and Manila, the urban poor had to fend for themselves to survive, with some residents returning to rural hometowns and others relying on self-help and mutual aid provisions. Considered are questions of gender, especially in terms of the role women played in self-help and mutual aid provisions, and the role of non-government organisations in addressing some of the worst impacts of COVID-19 for vulnerable populations. Recio et al. (2021) conclude with five interrelated observations from their analysis: there was inadequate state support; people left cities in their attempts to manage exposure to the pandemic; the enforcement of lockdown measures was unjustly applied across populations; therefore, a politics of invisibility was critical to how the pandemic played out; and solidarity-based initiatives that emerged were critical in dealing with the pandemic for the urban poor. Carol Farbotko (2021) brings us back to the Global South, and the management of COVID-19 across and within national borders on one of the islands of the Pacific nation of Tuvalu. Much like the case examined by Chris Gibson and colleagues below, state management of the pandemic in Tuvalu was informed by the island nation’s reliance on maritime and port infrastructure and by the need for “self-reliance,” which placed limits on external cargo supplies and humanitarian aid from an “infected outside world” (Farbotko, 2021, p. 185). Farbotko’s work advances several of the themes noted in this editorial, including questions of place, state management of pandemics in the Global South, and connections between the rural and urban. Farbotko explores the prospect of “transforming the interpretation, understanding, and experience of place in the absence of infection” (p. 182). In other words, what happens to our understanding of place when COVID-19 does not biologically penetrate the national border? Her material and cultural geographic analysis takes as its point of departure a newly constructed road called COVID-19 Road, which is on one of Tuvalu’s eight islands. The article integrates a sophisticated material analysis of the physical landscape of COVID-19 Road, a cultural analysis of familial and kinship ties and how they relate to people and place, and a governmental analysis of the response to the pandemic with more everyday practices. A key finding is the emergence of rurality as a critical spatial construction of health security by the Tuvalu state. As Farbotko (2021) writes, those “outer islands of Tuvalu, long mythologised as the nation’s real heartland, are being constructed as secure, while the capital is insecure against COVID-19 risk" (p. 182). The idea of rural place and space as secure and safe, argues Farbotko (2021), was central to the state’s “advice for urbanites living on the main island of Funafuti to voluntarily return to one of the eight other rural islands to which they claim kinship ties" (p. 182). For us, her analysis also highlights the salience of Bissell’s (2021) articulation of five shifting dimensions of place under COVID-19 and prompts people to think about the relations between these different dimensions of place under COVID-19, which are located around rurality, isolation, islandness, subsistence, remoteness, and the customary practices of food security. from the placing of blame (“China virus”) and the revisiting of Cold War security alliances (for example, Taiwan and the United States; Russia as an “enemy state”) to great power competition (Russia, China, and the United States mobilising their own forms of medical diplomacy and stock-piling strategies) and to opportunities for others. (p. 173) Commenting on what they term “great power competition,” together with the underlying biopolitics of pandemic response, Cole and Dodds (2021) close by calling for a “critical pandemic geopolitics of the future” that would be characterised by a careful scrutiny of the “legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic” in ways that enable “alternative geopolitical ideas and practices" (p. 179). Kearns (2021) turns our attention to the narratives and metaphors that shaped responses to the pandemic, particularly in Aotearoa New Zealand. Kearns refers to three spatial metaphors that characterise New Zealand's responses to the pandemic and notes that a range of geographically-inflected metaphors have shaped both public health responses to, and broader public understandings of, the pandemic—for example, metaphors of “social distancing” or “sheltering in place” (p. 324). Metaphors refer to levels—vividly symbolised by the use of risk “levels” as a key tool public health messaging; to bubbles—together with the invitation that “Kiwis should ‘stay local, in their bubble’” (p. 327); and to the team—perhaps most vividly embodied in the use of social media by NZ Prime Minister, then Jacinda Ardern, who, “each evening during the lockdown period … would complement her earlier formal press conference with a casual chat from home” (p. 328). Centring on a domestic setting, Kearns argues that these chats “can be read as a conscious act of solidarity with Kiwis whose domestic spaces had become characterised by blurred boundaries between home and work” (p. 327). Kearns concludes by exploring the role of spatially inflected metaphors in defining—and reshaping the everyday geographies of—a pandemic population. McGuirk et al. (2021) add to our thinking about pandemic governance by considering urban innovation during COVID-19. Unlike examples of urban governance in the Global South outlined above by Recio et al. (2021), governments in the Global North were given social and political licence—at least by some—to experiment with how to manage cities and their infrastructures and populations. McGuirk et al. (2021) refer to four relatively familiar urban governance modalities: city networks; collaborative networks led by the private sector; philanthropy; and civic groups. Their work provides a useful review of these four modalities in and of itself. Yet, as the key contribution of the article, their purpose is to articulate the urban governance context of that analysis, which they do by outlining three emergent urban governance mechanisms under COVID-19. Using Australian and international case studies, the authors consider the actors who took centre stage as their cities responded to the pandemic in “innovative” ways. The first innovation refers to “experimental mechanisms” mobilised quickly by the state and private sector as a set of front-line pandemic measures. These measures included various forms of experimentation such as pilots, demos, trials, and tracking that involve the suspension or acceleration of conventional urban governance processes. The second innovation refers to “data-driven mechanisms” that accelerated how spatialised data, data-driven decision making, and app-based forms of governing in urban management are built into our urban governance systems. The third innovation pertains to the way “crowdsourcing mechanisms” were used to diversify and expand the capacities, capabilities, and policy approaches for governing complex urban environments through and beyond the pandemic. “COVID-19 has promulgated crowdsourcing as a way to leverage collective intelligence and resources to address both immediate need and pathways to recovery,” suggest the authors (p. 192). The article concludes with a suite of cautionary remarks about if and how these urban innovations might be networked into the urban governance processes of the future. In their study of municipal governance of the first wave of COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro de de Góis et al. (2022) explore similarly geographically-inflected moves of socio-spatial governance. Focusing on the period between February and July 2020, and especially on the enactment of emergency measures designed to produce forms of “social isolation,” they find that in this early phase of the pandemic “more legal measures to ensure social isolation were enacted at the municipal level than at state and federal levels, and across all governmental levels” (p. 33). They also find that in the enactment of these legal instruments “there was a predominance of measures enacted by executive power” (p. 33). This striking finding underlies the geographies of COVID-19 health responses—enacted in ways that “sought to change daily patterns of movement, mobility, and sociability by directly intervening in the dynamics of central urban functions as well as in the access to and use of public spaces” (p. 38). Mirroring Kearns’ (2021) description of the ways in which public and social media discussion of COVID-19 health measures in Aotearoa New Zealand focused on domestic scale of the house, de Góis et al. (2022) suggest that broader public and media discussion in Brazil “framed the public problem of social isolation according to a geographical imaginary deeply intertwined with iconic public spaces such as beaches and street commercial areas” (p. 38). Operating at a similar scale, Morgan (2022) explores local government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Tasmania. She opens her analysis by noting Datu’s (2020) editorial in Geographical Research, which suggests that the “geographical study of local government is fundamental to understanding how questions of power, politics, and public services play out across individual places and communities within a nation or state” (p. 304). In this light—and on the basis of research conducted to explore the ways in which systems thinking “can support improvements to community health and wellbeing” (p. 641)—Morgan argues that responses to COVID-19 adopted at local and state government levels “have shown the capacity of government … to be responsive, flexible and adaptive” (p. 645). More broadly, she proposes that the prioritisation of health outcomes as a key priority of government intervention helped to enable governance arrangements transcend contemporary political and policy logics of economic efficiency. Read alongside an analysis by Anderson et al. (2021) about how responses to COVID-19 have been enrolled into, and served to reinforce (neo)liberal forms of governing, Morgan’s picture of the centrality of government at all levels in formulation and implementation of responses to COVID—and opportunities for “collaboratively redesigning policies informed by systems thinking” (p. 647)—provides a vivid picture of the diverse and overlapping political and policy logics in evidence in responses to COVID-19. The intersections between COVID-19 and material culture are a key theme in a study by Brydges et al. (2021) of the changing geographies of fashion in the context of the pandemic. Working with the notion of path dependency—a key concept in economic geography deployed to explore the “historical processes underpinning the development of regions, industries, and/or technologies” (p. 207)—Brydges et al. (2021) explore how it has shaped the creation of an Australian fashion identity and how the supply chain dynamics were impacted by the pandemic. Documenting the impact on firm-level dynamics, fashion retail and globalised patterns of garment production, Brydges et al. suggest the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an “acceleration of industrial disruption and the emergence of new pathways in the industry” (p. 212). At the same time—and reflecting responses to the disruption of global supply chains more generally—they report that in the early phases of the pandemic there appear to be “some signs that … sustainability may be a growing priority in the Australian fashion industry and could become another source of competitive advantage” (p. 212). Building on the urban governance theme, Gibson et al. (2021) turn to the critical connective tissue of our cities; the trading zones and ports that connect material goods with urban economies and the possible role of local manufacturing at times of crisis, and beyond. Their article covers a lot of ground, from the role that shipping plays in moving viruses around the world from port to port to the ways in which temporary port closures impact on the movement of goods into cities, including medical and personal protective equipment which was so critical during the pandemic. Writing from Australia’s largest industrial complex, Port Kembla, which is located just south of Sydney, the team members work through five key themes in their analysis. The section on disruptions to global supply chains shows how sudden shocks to global supply chains, either through disruption or increased consumption present a threat to these supply lines themselves. And the “Coronavirus has spawned additional challenges, both in terms of the logistical mobilities of commodities and from geopolitical tensions amplified by the pandemic” (p. 198). The section on the domestic industrial capacity and the future of manufacturing considers how the pandemic renewed debate about domestic industry and manufacturing. As global supply chains were disrupted, we turned to domestic manufacturing capacity to deal with shortages, especially in terms of medical supplies. Retooling different amenable industries and the production process became a critical short-term focus of the government. The section on biosecuring industrial sites considers ports’ unique feature as key interfaces between global maritime and local terrestrial space. Our ports are key sites for both the control and spread of infectious diseases, and therefore are critical maritime-to-terrestrial junctures that are used to regulate the movement of people, materials, goods and diseases. The section on precarious work exposes how the industrial landscapes of ports and other spaces where physical goods move across the maritime-to-terrestrial threshold were affected by the pandemic. And finally, the section on the emergency response capacities within industrial communities present a more positive story about local resilience and a culture of experimentation that underwrote the emergence of a somewhat organic regional industrial capacity in peoples’ homes and communities. Building on the intersections between COVID-19 and material culture, Smith et al. (2021) invite us into a place-based understanding of the pandemic, sharing Gumbaynggirr understandings of the pandemic. Their work is based on a collaborative authorship project, “Yandaarra, a research collective guided by Country” (p. 161), which comprises “Aunty Shaa Smith, storyholder for Gumbaynggirr Country, her daughter Neeyan Smith, a young Gumbaynggirr woman and future Elder, and three non-Gumbaynggirr academics” (p. 161). Smith et al. (2021) start by introducing Baalijin, a mischievous eastern quoll. They describe how on Gumbaynggirr, in the mid-north coast of New South Wales, Baalijin evokes a disruptive energy and suggest that, in the time of the pandemic, “we are living Baalijin’s creation story now, of things gone drastically out of balance and being called to walk on the bridge together through big change” (p. 161). A key contribution that they make, then, is to centre Indigenous knowledge in geographical research, and in relation to COVID-19 specifically. For them, COVID-19 “disrupts business as usual” and “brings into clarity the many ways that the dominant system is unsustainable and fails to support the wellbeing of people and our Mother Earth” (p. 164). It is also from that perspective that Smith et al. articulate something of the diversity of Indigenous experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. They remind us that “Indigenous people, and people living in poverty are hit the hardest and suffer most in their health, with their safety, and in their livelihoods” (p. 163). At the same time, and citing Lucashenko’s (2020) compelling account of Indigenous survival, they also note that “there is always more to the Aboriginal story than suffering” (p. 163). They write evocatively of the opportunities that the Baalijin creation provides for people to write a new story “through which we can heal people and Country and learn to belong well” (p. 165). Anderson et al. (2021) explore what they call the “uneven distribution of futurity” evident in responses to the pandemic. Building on earlier work on the temporality of emergencies that emphasised the need to “focus on the way emergency claims emerge out of, and reinforce, a racially uneven distribution of temporality within modern societies” (Anderson et al., 2020, p. 623), they argue that the COVID-19 pandemic disrupts how emergencies are commonly imagined in contemporary emergency governance and preparedness. In place of a “smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post-event recovery,” they argue that the develop a conception of the “distended temporality” of the COVID-19 pandemic served to bring into “sharp relief other slow emergencies such as racism, poverty, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which inflect how the pandemic is known and governed as an emergency” (p. 6). Critical to that analysis is an account of the unevenness of temporality—where the anticipation of a post-pandemic “bounce back” appears alongside the “the repetitive temporality of recurring plantation violence and the durative temporality of suspension within violent anti-Black and anti-Indigenous environments” (p. 7. See also: Mullings, 2021; Thomas, 2016). They explore instances of this uneven distribution of futurity evident in the imagination of a COVID-19 “snap back” enabled by a “gas-fired recovery” in Australia—further evidence of how pandemic responses throughout 2020 and 2021 were “co-opted … into a rear-guard action by the fossil fuel regime and used to help secure a ‘carbon revival’” (p. 11). And they consider the emergence of anti-lockdown protests in the United States of America, which emerged as part of a “panicked White response, an attempt to reassert the privileges of Whiteness by forcing open the economy” in ways that serve to reconfigure “emergency apparatuses, recalibrating law, emergency response, and public health regulations in ways that force at-risk populations to expose themselves to the possibility of infection and premature death in order to preserve the privileges and comforts of Whiteness” (p. 14). Anderson et al. (2021) conclude by suggesting that responses to COVID-19 intensify the logics of contemporary liberal governance and reveal the underlying temporalities of slow emergencies and forms of structural and racialised violence, particularly as experienced in settler colonial societies. A key theme evident in geographical research and reflection on COVID-19 concerns the practices of teaching and education in the context of a pandemic. While telecommunications infrastructures and digital technologies provided significant means through which social and ecomonomic relations were redesigned, these technologies also brought local schools into peoples’ homes. Beasy et al. (2021) present empirical data on home-schooling during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Their work shows that parents and caregivers had to take on more responsibility for children’s education under their care when they were unable to attend school. Their analysis is located at the triple intersection of schooling’s swift rupture by the pandemic, of various social, cultural and material realities of households, and of the structural landscape of education in Australia. Teaching was forced beyond school gates. As teachers searched for new and creative ways of working with students and their families, they forged new teaching relationships with students and their caregivers. Creating a classroom in the private space of the home meant coordinating a complex set of online and physical learning materials and reconfigured social expectations and routines between caregivers and children. In their discussion of the challenges of university level teaching in context of COVID-19, Fuller et al. (2021) draw links between—on one hand—discussions about telecommunications infrastructures, digital technologies, and learning cultures and—on the other—discussions about mobility and place. They turn to the impact of COVID-19 on higher education in Australia, which was framed by two key mobility changes that were operative at two distinct scales; international student restrictions related to movements across international borders and physical restrictions related to university campus closures during COVID-19. While international students are a major source of university revenue, restrictions on international student travel to and entry into Australia—as well as domestic restrictions on student movement—resulted in universities moving to online teaching very swiftly. Much like observations made by Beasy et al., they suggest that creating university lectures and tutorials in the private space of university staff members’ homes reconfigured the relationships between student and teacher. Reflecting on their experiences at the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, Fuller et al. (2021) outline three key COVID-19 teaching interventions. The transition period emerged immediately after the decision by their university to close the campus and move all classes online and, in response, they consider certain consequential challenges—including disruption to fieldwork and work-based placements. The advocacy period emerged soon after and was less reactionary. In that moment, the authors later reflected, they were more considered in their approaches to teaching and able to identify and advocate for their discipline within the university. The third period was defined as a moment of hybridity within which longer-term impacts of the pandemic on teaching began to emerge, as did a realisation that hybrid forms of teaching were here to stay, at least in some form. Building on this theme of education during the pandemic Burton (2021) engages in a project of “therapeutic wayfinding” (p. 217) in the context of the pandemic. Deploying an autoethnographic approach, Burton (2021) writes a deeply personal reflection of the early phases of the pandemic, when caught between the “simultaneously dangerous and vulnerable bodies of the COVID-19-pandemic” (p. 217). Burton (2021) account might therefore be read as a form of pandemic learning. Writing that “autoethnography deepens our engagement with social justice, curiosity and empathy,” (p. 222) he engages with perennial themes in geographical research—the intersections between embodiment, scale, home and the nation state. In an intriguing passage, Burton refers to Goffman’s (1959) distinction between front stage and back stage—a performative model of social communication defined by what Goffman describes as “the symmetry of the communication process” characterised by “a potentially in-finite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery” (p. 8). For Burton, all that became scrambled in the interior worlds created by public health orders enacted in response to the virus. In fact, “the old backstage of my bedroom has become a new frontstage of my life,” where the distinctions between these stages—indeed between inside and outside, between public and private, and between communal and individual—is navigated through “technologies like the webcam and the microphone” (p. 222). Writing the pandemic through the idiom of the ethnographic and the practice of journaling is, for Burton, a mode of attending both to the socio-material geographies of COVID-19 and to the ways the pandemic and public health responses to it reconfigured those geographies. The former Washington Post President and publisher Philip L. Graham is often credited with articulating the truism that journalism might be understood as “the first rough draft of history.” Writing from the pandemic itself, in real-time, and in ways inflected by public health responses to the pandemic, provides a unique vantage point by which to account for the emergent geographies of the pandemic, while being mindful of the ways in which responses to COVID-19 have been enrolled into longer running socio-spatial orderings. Equally as clear—and made plain by the depth of analysis across papers in this section—is that the geographical and socio-spatial dynamics of COVID-19 and the logics underpinning adopted government and health responses to it will be areas of profoundly important research and reflection for many years. At the time of writing, much has changed since the initial formulation of a proposal for a section of Geographical Research concerned with the geographies of COVID. The pandemic is far from over, of course. At the same time, government agencies across the world refer to “normalising” COVID-19, increasingly adopting or enshrining a series of biopolitical and geopolitical responses to successive waves of the pandemic. Governments appear to be investing faith in the development of vaccines and anti-virals in place of more centralised public health and lock-down measures adopted during the early phases of the pandemic and are urging populations to learn to “live with” the virus (Davis, 2022; Lupton, 2022). The histories of COVID-19 will therefore need to be written and rewritten. But what we have learned from this special section is the significance of geographical research in the telling of the stories of COVID-19. We acknowledge Professor Elaine Stratford, Editor-in-Chief of Geographical Research, for her leadership in the conceptualisation, formulation, and compilation of this special thematic section and the generosity of the authors of the papers we have reviewed in this editorial. All errors in fact or interpretation remain, of course, ours. The authors report no conflict of interest. N/A.