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[COVID-19 Pandemic: Worlds Stories from the Margins] THE DAY AFTER

by Gustavo Esteva

No future

We lost floor underfoot.

Our world was reasonably predictable. Suddenly, from one day to another, deep trends that allowed us to anticipate the general and probable course of events and behaviors disappeared. We can no longer foresee what will happen. We are facing radical uncertainty.

There are inertias, obsessions, propensities and hobbies. We can correctly assume that a variety of actors and sectors of society will persist in the lines of behavior that characterize them. But we cannot know the outcome of their actions in what will undoubtedly be a new balance of forces, under radically new circumstances.

The world we will experience after the pandemic will not have changed because of it, but for previous critical conditions. We know almost nothing about the climate that is emerging after the climate collapse. Even less do we know what will remain of the institutions after the socio-political collapse. The pandemic only heightened the challenges at the crossroads we had already reached.

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[COVID-19 Pandemic: Worlds Stories from the Margins] F*** Professionalism: or Why We Cannot Return to ‘Normal’

by Sara C. Motta

READ IN SPANISH

Returning to this blog post 10 days after it was initially and hurriedly penned as the layers of exhaustion and necessity of not returning to, or acting, normal becomes increasingly urgent and palpably felt-sensed.

Writing from solo isolation with my two youngest and third arriving next week, in my bed, recovering from a virus and sore lungs (not ‘the’ virus, I think), in my PJs and unwashed hair. Youngest watching Netflix (sorry doesn’t work to give him a task he can get on with at 7am until lunch time as suggested in a RMIT article with steps on to how to manage time during a pandemic!- I might just get 20 minutes at a stretch).

Wonder why some of our voices get drowned out?

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[COVID-19] Pandemic agnotology and the ‘worlds’ of development

by Su-ming Khoo

The ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic places a magnifying glass on many issues of local and global fairness and justice that have been ignored and under-emphasised. The world-wide outbreak, the public health measures to contain it, and the resulting socioeconomic disruption call for greater attention to be paid to the inequities and injustices that have been hiding in plain sight. The problems of under-emphasis and apparent lack of knowledge about who is really suffering maps directly onto trajectories traced in critical development studies.

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COVID-19 Pandemic: Worlds Stories from the Margins

by Rosalba Icaza & Zuleika Sheik

Some discomforts, reflections and an invitation.

The storyteller imbues the margins and our embodied experiences of oppression with sacredness for as Anzaldúa (2007: 60) describes those who are pushed out and have faced multiple oppressions are most likely to develop ‘la facultad’ – the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities. The ones possessing this sensitivity are ‘excruciatingly alive to the world’ and from critical collective remembering, recreating and reweaving these experiences can develop the most complex and multiple forms of liberatory praxis ~ Sara Motta

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[COVID-19] (Insubordinate) Conviviality in the COVID-19 Conjuncture

by Manolo Callahan

There is no escaping COVID-19. And by now, most agree we all must contribute what we can to minimize the impact of this deadly virus. Unfortunately, there is less agreement about what has changed and even more uncertainty about what will be our “new normal” as we pass through this crisis. The battle lines over what is or isn’t “normal” have never been more clearly drawn. Do we return to the system as it once was, resurrecting what brought us to this moment, or do we engage some other way of living, working, and celebrating together?

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The ‘Naked’ Researcher

by Jeevika Vivekananthan

Vankkam. Wominjeka.

I am a Tamil diaspora woman living on the land of Wurundjeri people. I acknowledge the elders past, present and emerging for their wisdom and the resistance against all forms of oppression. Even though I come from a war-and-conflict-affected Tamil community in the North of Sri Lanka, I acknowledge my positionality as someone exposed to both the Global South and the Global North, using North and South labels in a metaphorical distinction to denote an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism and geopolitics. I am not an academic nor an expert. As a toddler researcher, I recently presented a reflection piece at a conference hosted by the Development Studies Association of Australia in Melbourne, reflecting on my journey from a student researcher to a researcher. This is the written script of my presentation, slightly modified for the purpose of publication at Convivial Thinking, encouraging the readers to contest and reflect on the concept/ practice- the ‘naked’ researcher.

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[COVID-19] Coronavirus and the much needed overcoming of capitalism

by Ana Agostino

Read in Spanish

The arrival of the Coronavirus in Uruguay has put the population on alert and transformed daily life. The call to stay at home cannot be answered in the same way by all people, considering the activities they carry out but also because not everyone has the real possibility of confronting extreme situations given that the necessary social protection measures have not yet been put in place. What is clear is that, in line with what happened in other affected countries, either voluntarily, by measures suggested by the authorities or imposed by (more or less democratic) measures, the changes in daily life have been radical.

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[COVID–19] (Re)configurations of violent knowledge management, epistemic inferiorization and neo-colonial divisions

by Sayan Dey

In the following, I will argue how COVID-19 is re-configuring the already existing neo-colonial patterns of knowledge production and management in India.

As the pandemic of COVID-19 is quarantining and rampaging each and every aspect of habitual existence across the globe, the global education system (especially higher educational institutions like colleges and universities) is experiencing a monumental shift by converting the physically structured classroom system into an online one.

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[COVID-19] Conviviality in Quarantine

by Serena Stein

As Covid-19 accelerates in the United States, we are only beginning to come to terms with new realities of  ‘distancing,’ immobility, and enclosure that jeopardize the conviviality  and deeper bonds that sustain us. As infection and dis-ease spread throughout the world, the belated arrival of coronavirus to the United States was an opportunity to prepare for disaster that was largely squandered. As we now know, the fleeting window for better preparedness was undermined by disbelief, fueled by misleading statements from government officials, and namely the president. The following poem, written on Sunday March 15, is now a kind of artifact of a strange moment of incongruity, refusal, and impending doom in the brief interim before more severe measures were implemented to reduce coronavirus transmission in the American arena.

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