Privilege, Precarity and the Epistemic and Political Challenge of COVID-19

Abstract

Much of my initial shock at lockdown was the result of a loss of privilege. As a middle class professional working mother and a transnational scholar, I have constructed a life based on movement and freedom. Yes, I have ties that bind me: I am a single parent and a recent migrant to London, meaning my support network is somewhat limited. But with money I have been able to secure childcare and my career has allowed me to live simultaneously across three countries on three continents. So suddenly being locked in a small flat in London with restricted movement and full-time working and caring responsibilities was unsurprisingly an intensely traumatizing experience (reflected in my blog piece for the Feminist Review – https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/resisting-the-violence-of-common-sense/). As the weeks have turned into months, my points of focus have shifted. On the one hand it has become much clearer to me that it was losing the illusion of constantly ‘moving forward’ that I was mourning: of not being able to escape, feel a sense of momentum and freedom, of planning and anticipating future adventures. On the other, as the world began to reopen slowly, I also became much more conscious of how being ‘locked down’ had actually been a privilege in itself. Not everyone had that luxury. Both in my local setting of south east London and in my research ‘fieldsite’ of Sri Lanka, it became clear that many had not been able to secure themselves at home – ordering food (and anything else they desired!) delivered to their door, avoiding all forms of public transport, working from home, doing home renovation, youtube workouts and taking up new hobbies. Reflecting on the question of privilege from these two angles, I wonder how the COVID-19 pandemic may provide an important moment to return to questions of solidarity, resistance and progressive politics. For many elites we see ourselves as the vanguard of struggles. Yet our impatience with the present (let alone the past!), reliance (conscious or not) on ideas of progress and experience of constant movement makes us ill-equipped to sit in an uncomfortable present and uncertain future. Do we have the necessary skills, tools and imagination to respond to this time? Meanwhile the realities of extremely disadvantaged and marginalised people are that they have never had the luxury of relying on a social, political and economic system to support them. As a result, while they have often been terribly affected, they have not been shocked that they would be affected. Instead they have found (sometimes subversive) ways to survive and organize, developed informal networks of support and creative forms of resilience.
 
 With this in mind, how might we rethink which agents and whose knowledge might be most valuable in this moment when trying to articulate responsive and transformative politics and practices? How might this allow for a richer understanding of not only the experience but also the possible responses to the precarity that has become a dominant contemporary reality? And how might new epistemic and political practices emerge that are not only more ethical but also more productive, radical and disruptive of the existing order?