Doing nothing does something: Embodiment and data in the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic redefines how we think about the body, physiologically and socially. But what does it mean to have and to be a body in the COVID-19 pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic offers data scholars the unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to revisit and reinvent the fundamental concepts of our mediated experiences. The article critiques the data double, a longstanding concept in critical data and media studies, as incompatible with the current public health and social distancing imperative. The data double, instead, is now the presupposition of a new data entity, which will emerge out of a current data shimmer: a long-sustaining transition that blurs the older boundaries of bodies and the social, and establishes new ethical boundaries around the (in)activity and (im)mobility of doing nothing to do something. The data double faces a unique dynamic in the COVID-19 pandemic between boredom and exhaustion. Following the currently simple rule to stay home presents data scholars the opportunity to revisit the meaning of data as something given, a shimmering embodied relationship with data that contributes to the common good in a global health crisis.

The psychosocial implications of social distancing for people with COPD: some exploratory issues facing a uniquely marginalised group during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…In order to inform and to direct the emergence of such research studies, this paper offers an overview of recent philosophical and theoretical innovations within the field of embodied phenomenology exploring the existential meanings of social distancing (Carel et al 2020 ; Dolezal 2020 ; Goli 2020 ; Rossolatos 2020 ; Vallee 2020 ). In so doing, this paper seeks to apply these meanings to what is already known from phenomenological research about the embodied experiences of people with COPD (Williams and Carel 2018 ; Macnaughton 2020 ) to consider how people with COPD in the UK may experience social distancing.…”

“…Through changing the nature of place, and through changing the nature of how humans relate and interact within this place, social distancing both face to face and online is changing and challenging the phenomenology of the human body as a social being. This invites new consideration of Heidegger’s ontology (Carel et al 2020 ; Rossolatos 2020 ) and new thinking about concepts of intercorporeality (Dolezal 2020 ; Katila et al 2020 ) and embodiment (Carel et al 2020 ; Vallee 2020 ).…”

“…Within a pandemic, however, anyone’s body could potentially become infected, breathless, and sick from COVID-19; anyone’s body and anyone themselves might embody disease and illness. Embodiment becomes fragile and changeable as our increasing reliance on electronic forms of communication leaves an increasingly complex “shimmer” of our data online (Vallee 2020 ).…”

Journaling the COVID‐19 pandemic: Locality, scale, and spatialised bodies

“…This is not the first interpretive study on COVID‐19 (Barry, 2020; Tedeschi, 2020; Tyner & Rice, 2020; Vallee, 2020; Ventriglio, Watson, & Bhugra, 2020), discussion of its impact on young people (Collardo, Orozco, & Banaria, 2020; Mohamad, 2020), by young people (Dindoyal, 2020; Willis & Cockburn, 2020), or discovery of therapeutic journaling in the pandemic (Munyikwa, 2020; Ward, 2020). I combine these features in autoethnography, explicitly engaging with the unequal geographies of COVID‐19.…”

“…Nevertheless, experiential and evocative autoethnography adds nuance to the medicalised, utopian, and sometimes uncritical assumptions situating COVID‐19. Like Vallee (2020), I think the COVID‐19 pandemic is an opportunity for new perspectives. I reflect on my experiences and positionality in the COVID‐19 pandemic to help encourage this (re)defining (Herrmann, 2012, 2017; Stephens, 2020).…”