e-zine #2

“The Precipice of a Pandemic: Interscalar Visions of Social Justice”

Letter from the Editor David Ng

The sociopolitical ruptures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have shifted the world that we once knew.  We have seen how the pandemic has reinforced and entrenched already existing social inequalities, with those most marginalized - Black, Indigenous, people of colour, poor, working class, disabled, queer (and others) - being most adversely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. However, despite the enforcement of social distancing and quarantine, we have seen monumental political, social and economic upheavals. We’ve witnessed how the sociopolitical fissures caused by the implications of the pandemic have amplified social inequalities and led to mass organizing around the world. While stay-in-place orders were implemented, what was in one sense interiorized and ‘made still’, in another sense galvanized humanity towards the interscalar.

The collection of contributions in this zine reflects these sentiments, and captures nuances of the conditions of the pandemic; the emotions, the struggles, the tensions.  Kodwo Eshun describes the experience of living through a pandemic as an interscalar experience, where we theorize about humanity, the global, the planetary; but also the local and the micro.  As the world is reconfigured based on the logic of the fomite, and social systems of isolation and distancing are recalibrated and continually choreographed (Eshun, 2020), what do these seismic, discursive shifts produce at the community level? As Arundhati Roy wrote in The Pandemic is a Portal, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew.  This one is no different.  It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”  What visions of transformation can be revealed through the precipice that the pandemic has pushed humanity towards? Reflecting on the local, the community, the global: how the experience of the pandemic has been an interscalar experience.  

What new imaginations have emerged?