Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

'Stay Home, Stay Safe': Proximity as Vitality and Vulnerability Under Lockdown

House, Lydia; Hopkinson, Leo

'Stay Home, Stay Safe': Proximity as Vitality and Vulnerability Under Lockdown Thumbnail


Authors

Lydia House



Abstract

From March to May 2020 in the UK, measures that became known across the world as ‘lockdown’ curtailed personal freedoms in order to curb the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus. While initial criticisms of lockdown focused on the adverse impacts of social isolation on wellbeing, this research article explores how lockdown creates new and altered proximities and intimacies as well as distances. During the initial UK lockdown, the ‘household’ and ‘home’ were deployed in public rhetoric as default spaces of care and security in the face of widespread isolation and uncertainty. However, emergent proximities created by bringing people together in the assumed safety of home also deepened existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. Using anthropological theory, third sector evidence, and ethnographic interview data we explore this process. We argue that understanding proximity and intimacy as fundamentally ambivalent, not normatively affirming, is central to recognising how pandemic responses such as lockdown reinforce and reproduce existing forms of inequality and violence.

Citation

House, L., & Hopkinson, L. (2021). 'Stay Home, Stay Safe': Proximity as Vitality and Vulnerability Under Lockdown. Medicine Anthropology Theory, 8(3), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.3.5143

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 28, 2021
Online Publication Date Sep 28, 2021
Publication Date 2021
Deposit Date Nov 4, 2021
Publicly Available Date Nov 5, 2021
Journal Medicine Anthropology Theory
Print ISSN 2405-691X
Publisher Edinburgh University Library
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 8
Issue 3
Pages 1-29
DOI https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.3.5143

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations