Projekt

The project team argues that people's readiness to support pandemic response measures in the future, notably mobility restrictions, will be shaped by the highly emotional perceptions of the unequal consequences of different forms of lockdown, isolation, and border closure that has formed the COVID-19 response. The project team consists of research partners with a background from social and cultural anthropology as well as medical anthropology and economics. The group aims to explore how individual and shared perceptions of the COVID-19 response in countries with very different political-economic and epidemiological histories - South Africa, Germany, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Korea - are shaped by three interrelated dynamics which form the theoretical concept of the study: (1) the implementation of mobility regimes (complex sets of laws, technologies, and scientific expertise) by local, national, and regional governments across the pandemic; (2) the unequal impact (based on gender, age, ethnicity/race, dis/ability, and socio-economic status) of mobility restrictions on people's lives; (3) the affective embodiment (long-term inscription of people's emotional experiences and memories of public health measures) of mobility regimes and their differential impact beyond acute pandemic situations. The methodology constitutes a critical and decolonial one-field approach across the four study sites and includes participant observation, semi-structure and biographical interviews, and archival as well as online research. The research will be conducted in a mutual learning process with health scientists and psychologists, civil society representatives, and policy-makers as well as research partners at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. The project team aims to formulate a model of pandemic preparedness that firmly incorporates populations' perceptions and needs along with various forms of expert knowledge that have informed the ongoing COVID-19 response.

• Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Dilger

  Freie Universität Berlin
  Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie
  Berlin
  

• Prof. Dr. Julia Hornberger

  University of the Witwatersrand
  Department of Anthropology
  Braamfontein, Johannesburg
  Südafrika
  

• Prof. Dr. Nene Morisho Mwanabiningo

  Pole Institute
  Goma
  Kongo (Demokratische Republik - Kinshasa)
  

• Ass. Prof. Dr. Bo Kyeong Seo

  Yonsei University
  Department of Cultural Anthropology
  Seoul
  Korea (Süd)
  

• Dr. Sung-Joon Park

  Bernhard-Nocht-Institut
  für Tropenmedizin (BNITM)
  AG Medical Anthropology
  Hamburg