Storying Pandemia Collectively: Sharing Plural Experiences of Interruption, Dislocation, Care, and Connection

Abstract

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of academic geographers got together across borders to share our varied experiences. In this paper we illustrate how this storying of pandemia helped us critically and collaboratively understand, (re)imagine and reconfigure ways of living during a global pandemic. We were especially interested in exploring different forms and practices of collective thinking and academic labour, within and beyond the academy. This paper foregrounds emotions and lived experiences, power and positionality, natures, bodies, and relations, and how they have come to our attention in new, different, or more pronounced ways, through everyday geographies of pandemia. Our aim is to emphasise two important aspects: that pandemia is a state of being with/as/through pandemic, and, as a collective noun, pandemia centres plurality, focusing on the potential to attend to the ways experiences of pandemic are redolent with multiple, overlapping exclusions and belongings, openings and closures.