Knowing COVID-19

## Knowing COVID-19 The pandemic and beyond *Edited by*

Fred Cooper and Des Fitzgerald

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2024

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This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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### **Contents**

#### vi *Contents*

### **Series preface: The pandemic and beyond**

*Pascale Aebischer, Fred Cooper, Des Fitzgerald, Karen Gray, Caroline Redhead, Melanie Smallman and Victoria Tischler*

In the first days of 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic began to spread across the globe. It prompted a concerted international research effort which set out to understand not just the workings of the virus, but the ways that we responded to, lived and died with it. This led to a significant body of work being produced at speed, in which arts and humanities played a crucial role. In the UK, *The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery* was established by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) early in 2021 to coordinate this research effort.1 Over the span of two years, *The Pandemic and Beyond* grew into a virtual hub that enabled over seventy COVID-19 research teams funded by the AHRC to meet, exchange ideas and work together to ensure that their research would make a difference on the ground.2

This series is a legacy of this collaboration and bears witness to an extraordinary period, in which arts and humanities research became an integral part of the UK's research response to an emergency, leading to tangible changes in the role, purpose and methods of the arts and humanities, and laying important human foundations for recovery. It is divided into four volumes, each corresponding to four research clusters co-produced during the coordination process. A first group focused on working with professionals and policymakers in the creative industries to investigate the existential struggles of creative workers and organisations impacted by the ban on live in-person performance, and to devise new ways of connecting people through live arts while trying to build more inclusive and sustainable industry structures. A second set of research teams connected arts and creative practitioners with cultural and community organisations, as well as care settings, with whom they worked to alleviate the social and mental health impacts of public health restrictions. These projects drew on arts- and nature-based activities to forge pathways for improving mental and physical health for individuals and communities. A third cluster examined the informational and epistemic experience of a pandemic that was a whirlwind of often deeply confusing and contested data. Artists, designers and linguists explored design solutions and devised how public health messages could be formulated so that they would reach the communities most severely affected by the spread of the virus. A final group of researchers concentrated on scrutinising legislation and guidance issued in haste, and grappled with thorny questions of rights and responsibilities, seeking to underpin developing scientific understanding with values-based frameworks that offered a more nuanced approach to balancing risks and benefits.

The richness of this research portfolio stems not only from its breadth but also from the ingenuity of the teams involved, members of which rapidly applied their expertise and creativity to a problem few had foreseen, working with communities whose vulnerabilities and prior marginalisation had been exacerbated disproportionately by the pandemic (Ryan, 2022: 198). What was initially perceived principally as a public health crisis was impacting on the population in myriad ways that branched well beyond physical health; encompassing mental health, but also social cohesion, crossgenerational justice, trust in governance, and economic distress. Looking back over the first few years of the pandemic, the authors of a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) conclude that the 'pandemic was a watershed moment for the Humanities because the importance of the variety and quality of individual human experience rose to the surface in our collective re-evaluation of priorities' (Thain et al., 2023: 13). Arts and humanities research concentrated on the human impacts of the crises that intersected in this moment, working to resolve them, mitigate harms and examine some of the most fundamental human questions across macro and micro crisis contexts, from the national and international to the local and hyper-local. As these volumes show, this work was characterised by cross-fertilisation between disciplines and an emphasis on partnership working. It featured collaboration; between academic and public institutions, but also, notably, with community groups and ix

frontline organisations, such as those representing health and social care. Collaborations also extended to industry, and regional, sectoral and national policymakers. We know from analysis of surveys of those involved in *Pandemic and Beyond* research that for many this involved drawing on existing relationships, which deepened and strengthened as the fluctuations of the pandemic necessitated constant dialogue and increased accountability on all sides (Aebischer et al., 2022: 26–29). For others, the pandemic resulted in potentially fruitful new connections, and the promise of further research, work that continues to be relevant and have impacts on policy and practice.

All of this required new ways of working, and the ability to reconcile the theoretically conceptualised and deliberative methodologies associated with humanities research, which often take years to mature into publication, with quick and direct application, which often left little scope for fine calibration and reflective writing. The temporal demand for research outputs, and their new or altered audiences, exerted intense and immediate demands on researchers. Policymakers expressed an appetite for actionable findings to support decision-making, and frontline workers, while exhausted and short of time and resources, were desperate for support; research, in consequence, was predominantly pragmatic and focused on solutions. This meant a sometimes uneasy pivot to new ways of working and new modalities and timescales for doing and sharing work. Researchers did not always find it easy to reach those for whom their findings might have been most relevant, but many published policy briefings or held private meetings to share their insights and recommendations with potential user groups. Some projects embedded researchers within policy or service delivery organisations, narrowing the gap between research and practice still further. Work was often cyclical or iterative, with results shared earlier and more frequently, for example through pre-prints or the release of preliminary findings; if not a direct prerequisite for funding, the word 'rapid' in the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) COVID-19 call certainly implied that researchers had to reconsider how and when in the life cycle of a project potentially significant knowledge was shared. There was a flowering of online engagement and dissemination as research was translated into a rich variety of deeply practical resources. These included frameworks for action, advice for public health messaging, interventions that responded to real-time problems such as the isolation of residents and staff in care homes or the design of personal protective equipment (PPE), and coproducing guidance for employers of artists performing in digital live shows from their homes.

As *Pandemic and Beyond* researchers explored the dynamic nature of individual and collective experiences of the pandemic, they also demonstrated a particular sensitivity to those for whom its effects have been felt unequally, and for whom suffering has been most profound. Readers will find this concern consistently exemplified throughout these volumes. Indeed, our brief to the authors in this series invited them to create a space where those voices could be part of the conversation. Such work was by no means easy to do. It was ethically complex, requiring heightened reflexivity and cultural competency. It was complicated by the requirements for social distancing and the need to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of both participants and researchers. As one research leader put it: 'you cannot build diversity into a project from scratch under these conditions' (Aebischer et al., 2022: 27).

Carrying out research during a pandemic necessitated innovation and adaptation at all levels. This is reflected in the research methods adopted: mixed, interdisciplinary and often participatory or arts-based, with projects bringing immediate benefits to participants and communities even as policymakers were targeted with written work. In many of the projects, more reflective and long-form modes of writing were either not part of the research design or postponed to a later date, to allow for retrospective analysis and evaluation. Meanwhile, the nascent field of arts and health was propelled to the foreground by the pandemic. A growing evidence base demonstrates the importance of multiple artistic modalities (including music, visual art, poetry and drama) in supporting health and wellbeing for a range of physical and mental health conditions. In these contexts, research by *Pandemic and Beyond* teams was able to highlight the vital role of artistic and creative practice through exposing the dangerousness of working conditions for frontline staff, including for the predominantly female workforce in social care settings. Arts-based projects were able to offer practical tools and emotional support for care workers, while helping to alleviate the isolation that many felt when confined to their homes xi

by re-creating artistic activities that were delivered via post, online or outdoors. With remarkable speed, researchers working with arts and cultural providers pivoted to developing suitable resources and freely shared their work with collaborators and user groups.

At times, however, things moved frustratingly slowly, while structures around the research (including university recruitment, facilities, ethics and funding) creaked and failed to keep up; at other times, the most fundamental changes and compromises to research design had to be made at speed, to respond to events as they happened. When this research was at its best, there were refreshingly democratic opportunities for everyone involved to learn and apply new skills and take on new responsibilities. At their worst, however, the conditions in which research was conducted during the pandemic replicated existing structural problems in the academy. A great deal of the work was done by early career researchers on short-term contracts, for example, and researchers found themselves giving more than their contracted hours to this work, alongside their commitments to delivering newly remote or hybrid teaching, often while caring for home-schooled children or dealing with the impacts of the pandemic on their own networks and home environments. While it was often deeply rewarding, many researchers, like others in the population generally, found the lack of a distinction between home, work and the stresses of pandemic life difficult to negotiate. Remote working proved methodologically, physically and mentally challenging. However, as these chapters demonstrate so clearly, it led to the rapid creation and deployment of new tools and technologies for data collection, analysis and collaboration. These, in turn, are exerting pressure on funders and policymakers in UK Higher Education to adapt their frameworks to recognise the value and complexity of this type of crisis- and solutions-oriented collaborative response in arts and humanities research.

The work presented in this series as a distinctive and coherent portfolio is, of course, just part of a much wider programme of research to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and to address the COVID-19 emergency that was funded through UKRI.3 While the projects within the *Pandemic and Beyond* portfolio were all designed, in line with the parameters of the original rapid-response funding call, to take a largely UK focus, a range of other projects and funding calls cast their gaze further afield. For some existing projects with an international focus, this 'created new opportunities for exploration of existing topics' that were exacerbated by the pandemic (Pirgova-Morgan, 2022: 27). Other schemes which are not represented in these volumes, for instance the UKRI Global Research Challenges/Newton Fund, brought together researchers in the UK and in low- and middle-income countries. More than forty such collaborative projects sought to gain insights and provide support during the pandemic, including projects aiming to improve engagement with COVID-19 public health messages to develop online psychological support through the arts in Rwanda; and to find ways of engaging vulnerable communities in Brazil on the consequences of the pandemic. This range of international projects is likely to offer an opportunity for further reflection, comparisons, dialogue and lessons in the future.

At the same time, we should not forget that despite the COVID-19 pandemic being, by definition, a global phenomenon, it has also been markedly culturally specific, local and hyper-local. Even in purely scientific terms, the identity of the virus itself has not been a global constant. Different strains and variants have emerged in different geographies and populations, and symptoms and morbidities have varied from country to country, creating very different patterns of disease across the world. Similarly, our responses to the pandemic and our standards of evidence and certainty – alongside modes of reasoning, ways of knowing and understanding – vary across cultural contexts, as we encounter different policymaking arrangements and civic communities. This is clear from the comparative work of the 'Lex Atlas' research in the *Pandemic and Beyond* portfolio, whose researchers examined dozens of countries' legal responses to the pandemic (King and Ferraz, 2021–23). Lessons learned in one country do not, therefore, translate cleanly to others.

Even within the UK, the response to COVID-19 was not uniformly governed or experienced. Nor did the disease spread evenly across the country. Time and time again, low-income households and communities, as well as groups with pre-existing vulnerabilities, felt the worst effects of both the disease and the measures put in place to protect the population. This pandemic was perhaps also one of the most challenging instances in which the arrangements for devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the powers of the Westminster Government to oversee or xiii

coordinate national responses, were put to the test, prompting comparative analysis of the different modes and mechanisms of parliamentary review across the UK. This was complemented by scrutiny of data-driven approaches to decision-making and research that probed ethical and human rights issues. A deep delve into the situation in the UK provides us with valuable insight into the state of the nation – as well as our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic – in the early twenty-first century.

While arts and humanities research on COVID-19 in the UK is ongoing, and many are now engaged in the more considered process of retrospective analysis and critique, this series, produced at the endpoint of the rapid-response funding period, does represent a significant milestone. As such, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the multiple temporalities and intersectional crises that have characterised the first two years of the pandemic, along with the wider epistemic structures and infrastructures at stake in the delivery of this research portfolio. While COVID-19 had a fairly temporally precise beginning in the final days of 2019, at least as a distinct viral emergency, and was formalised as a global emergency with the World Health Organization's (WHO) declaration of a pandemic on 11 March 2020, it can also be understood as, at least in part, the product of a deeper crisis in terms of anthropogenic climate change and how we interact with the non-human (Gupta et al., 2021). COVID-19 has been a profoundly transformative, rupturing crisis, with over two million dead in Europe alone (WHO, 2022b). Worldwide, anxiety and depression increased by 25 per cent (WHO, 2022a), and access to professional services was challenging; over 100 million lost their jobs (WEF, 2021), and while some accessed furlough and insurance payments, freelancers and those in the gig economy were often ineligible (Fowler, 2020). COVID-19 identified and shone a light on 'key workers', who were defined as those whose work was deemed essential during the pandemic and who often turned out to be poorly paid, socially marginalised and previously 'invisible'. These workers included healthcare professionals as well as bus drivers, food retailers, refuse collectors and care home staff. While healthcare staff were routinely celebrated in the UK, most notably through the 'clap for our carers' phenomenon, this was not accompanied by material changes in stagnant pay or harmful working conditions, and others – such as domiciliary workers in care homes with older people – remained largely invisible.

As the virus began to transform the ways that we live and die, it pulled a series of overlapping crises and temporalities into tension, muddying any clean imagining of a shared pandemic trajectory. When the UK government announced extensive restrictions to movement and social life in the spring of 2020, disability scholars and activists noted that many disabled people had effectively been in 'lockdown' for years (Shakespeare et al., 2021). Likewise, COVID-19 intersected with deep-seated inequalities in race and health, landing disproportionately among people who had their ability to resist the virus eroded by generations of structural racism, and who were knowingly figured as disposable and exposed to greater risk than their white counterparts (Qureshi et al., 2022). Whole groups of people, including frail older people and those with underlying health conditions, were disproportionately negatively impacted. Other long and slow disasters and matters of justice (such as poverty, burnout in healthcare workers, or our inability to sufficiently care for the old) further altered the temporal bounds of the pandemic and fragmented our experiences of pandemic time (Baraitser and Salisbury, 2020). For doctors, nurses, cleaners and porters in overstretched hospital departments, time sped up (often in catastrophic ways); for those who were shielding or placed on furlough, the opposite was frequently true.

Among this profound and intractable messiness, attempts to impose a temporal order on the pandemic have always done a particular kind of political work. Across the conception and execution of these four volumes, rates of infection, illness and death have been in considerable flux; the state of the pandemic at the date of publication is impossible to know as we write this introduction in early 2023. We do know, however, that pandemics rarely – if ever – cleanly end (Greene and Vargha, 2020). The overlapping contexts and crises detailed above also frame wildly divergent apprehensions and realities of risk. Any intimation that we are becoming 'post-pandemic' must be met with a question the arts and humanities are uniquely poised to ask: for whom? The bereaved, still shielding, sufferers from 'long COVID', carers and healthcare professionals, after all, will continue to live pandemic time in different ways (Callard and Perego, 2021). One role of the arts and humanities amid this crisis xv

is (or has been) to make and preserve *meaning* out of what has been experienced. In each of these volumes, 'rapid-response' arts and humanities work has had to navigate these slippery experiences of time. If many of our projects responded to the pandemic first in ways that were 'quick and dirty', acting to comprehend, forestall, or inform the present, the research assembled here is more inclined to the future, seeking to take a tentative and reflective step back from the immediacy of the pandemic while acknowledging its ongoing nature.

The format of the crisis-driven rapid-response call is itself an unusual approach to the organisation of arts and humanities research, with its distinctively longitudinal and reflective modes of relating to social problems. In one sense, this speedy deployment of the arts and humanities at a moment of crisis is welcome: it positions researchers within these disciplines as having skills that are critical for intervening in moments of emergency and lifts humanities research out of the epistemic position of providing commentary or representational analysis after the event. It thus refuses the disingenuous political position that cultural, literary, historical and theory-informed analysis is incompatible with the crisis resolution. Indeed, as this is a moment in which arts and humanities research is *itself* widely understood to be in crisis (see Thain et al., 2023), this instrumentalisation presents important new possibilities, and perhaps one or two pitfalls, for scholars within these disciplines. The assumption – implicit in the funding announcement – that research in the arts and humanities is already collaborative, engaged, pragmatic, problem-oriented, public-facing and interdisciplinary, an image which many in the humanities research community have been promoting for some years, often in the face of opposition from colleagues, is itself worthy of note.

This also follows a long-standing trend in which humanities research, whose structures have predominantly been based (somewhat stereotypically) on the model of a lone scholar, working diligently on their idiosyncratic topic over a period of years, is remade to resemble a more scientific model. Such a 'scientific model' notably involves the organisation of a project into research teams and work packages, the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries that are not methodologically salient, larger amounts of money being awarded to smaller numbers of research teams, the need to clearly articulate the public impact of research, and responsiveness to government and industry priorities. This trend has been clearly accelerated by the reorganisation of humanities research infrastructures during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as we noted above, led to a much greater degree of collaboration, with several authors working remotely to write together, crossing institutional, geographical, disciplinary and hierarchical boundaries. The epistemic effects of such reorganisation have been real – and mixed. The organisation of research, after all, plays a large role in governing not just the type of writing possible in such circumstances, but also what research can and cannot be done. While the funding that framed the *Pandemic and Beyond* portfolio opened up many new possibilities for humanities researchers, it simultaneously foreclosed others. Scholars without a desire to work in teams, whose research did not need significant money or have clearly defined short- to medium-term impacts, will have struggled to contribute; a significant loss that mostly remains invisible. This portfolio showcases many new opportunities, but it also hides the opportunity costs – not only for humanities work directly on COVID-19, but for humanities research generally, as already scarce resources were poured into immediate responses to a single public health crisis.

In the context of a UK government research funding strategy which, as the March 2023 HEPI report notes, 'appears to downplay the position of the Arts and Humanities in the UK's ambition to become a "science superpower"' (Thain et al., 2023: 19), there is a wider political dimension to this, too. The COVID-19 crisis also coincided with a series of crises around Brexit, one of the most prominent of which concerned the possibility of the UK's participation in (or exclusion from) the EU's Horizon research programme. This created a context in which research was wielded openly as a token of national competitiveness, and international collaboration was reframed as a luxury that could be removed at a government's whim. While the UK focus of the *Pandemic and Beyond* research shielded this portfolio from some of these pressures, we nevertheless continuously faced the need to demonstrate, in a political climate ill-disposed to critical humanities thinking, the relevance, success, impact or transformational potential of this body of research. Against this backdrop, it was often tempting to frame our work xvii

to make it align with (party) political slogans such as 'build back better' or 'levelling up' to demonstrate a willingness to engage with political priorities. The need to establish such 'synergies' is now a common and perhaps unavoidable feature of research coordination and curation efforts such as that of *Pandemic and Beyond*. Indeed, the research we share through these volumes should also be understood in the context of a wider, global attack on the humanities, whether departmental closures in the United Kingdom, the driver for teaching efficiencies in Denmark, or legislative attacks in countries such as Hungary and the United States. The quick pivot to rapid-response work on COVID-19 is both an affirmative rebuttal to such attacks (our work is indeed both important and useful) *and* a frank recognition of how successful they have been (our work is only viable to the extent that we can successfully position it as both important and useful). Our work, then, while bearing witness to the importance, usefulness and practical applicability of arts and humanities research in crisis contexts, also situates itself within broader national and international debates about the role arts and humanities play in fostering and sustaining the creative and open-ended critical thinking that underpins democratic political structures.

#### **The** *Pandemic and Beyond* **series**

The aim of this series is to preserve the breadth of the approaches taken by *Pandemic and Beyond* researchers in addressing the crisis, showcasing a form of arts and humanities research that has learned how to respond to, and mitigate, COVID-19 as it unfolded, and that has constantly adapted its methods and research questions to ongoing developments and the needs of research participants. Reflecting the variety of the *Pandemic and Beyond* research portfolio, the chapters we have selected range from in-depth reflection on schools of thought and social and governance structures that have influenced approaches to the pandemic to those that are much more 'hands-on'. These latter chapters address subjects sometimes sidelined in conventional academic writing, as their focus on working structures, industrial practices and lived experience does not always lend itself easily to conceptual debates and theorisation. Written from the retrospective vantage point of late 2022 and the first months of 2023, these chapters offer a rare insight into the findings and often invisible facets of research projects whose primary focus was rapid on-the-ground impact, knowledge exchange, and direct engagement with communities, organisations and decision-makers. The chapters we collect not only offer reflection on what the research teams achieved, but also on what could be learned from their experiences to guide future responses to ongoing, accelerating and emerging crises, whether in relation to climate, migration, violent conflict, the threat of vaccine-resistant coronavirus variants, or other pathogens that could develop into new pandemics. The result is a series which models how, in responding to a crisis, the creativity, cultural sensitivity, community-reach and knowledge base of arts and humanities researchers can be one of the best tools to understand a novel virus in all its dimensions, steer policy and alleviate suffering on the ground.

In our volume *Adaptation and Resilience in the Performing Arts*, we explore how live performing arts in the UK innovated during public health restrictions to everyday life to overcome the obstacles to co-presence and performance in shared spaces that were a sideeffect of pandemic mitigation measures. The volume explores the financial hardship and mental health impacts experienced by industry professionals as governmental discourses regarding the 'viability' of arts careers, alongside the difficulties of connecting with networks and accessing arts opportunities, put a particular strain on creative workers and freelancers in the UK at a time when some Latin American countries were leading the way in valuing and supporting the arts. Against this backdrop of existential struggle for creative workers, this volume celebrates the ingenuity and creativity of artists and researchers who applied themselves to finding both digital and analogue solutions to the problem of co-presence, and who, in so doing, broadened the access of previously marginalised communities to live performing arts. It highlights projects that explored how motion-capture and green screen technologies can enable performers to come together despite geographical distance and interact in a shared virtual space to create new work, and how such digital work affects their art, wellbeing and ability to reach wider audiences. It also champions the value of local initiatives in outdoor spaces and suggests avenues for artists and local governments to xix

reimagine towns and cities as performance venues in which diverse communities can gather to celebrate their location and ability to communally enjoy art amid a pandemic.

The mobilisation of existing natural, community and cultural assets and resources to support individual and community wellbeing – conducted at speed and often using novel modes of delivery – was a notable feature of pandemic responses across the UK. Our volume *Creative Approaches to Wellbeing* presents detailed examples of research looking at how these kinds of activities sought to address issues such as the challenges of isolation, to support health and care workers, or to create spaces that could enable coping, recovery or renewal. Common to the chapters here are reflections on what it means and what tools and systems might be needed if we are to develop resilience during and after such crises in future, alongside examination of ideas of 'vulnerability'. Authors bring to these discussions a particular focus on the experiences of those most marginalised during the pandemic because of mental or physical ill-health, age, or due to deep-seated structural and systemic inequalities. Individual contributions include an interrogation of the idea of 'togetherness' itself; an invitation to consider the benefits of 'walking creatively', a study of the work of small organisations in promoting health through interaction with urban nature; and investigations of the contributions of the cultural, museum and literary heritage sectors to wellbeing. Looking forward, authors invite us to consider how adaptations to ways of working for individuals, within organisations, and even at the level of a whole city region, could lead to changes in provision and lessons for practice.

*Knowing COVID-19* looks at how different kinds of knowledge and meaning have been created and communicated, and the repercussions this has had – and continues to have – for how COVID-19 is managed, experienced, understood and remembered. Knowledge-making, it suggests, took various forms, and these are reflected in the diversity of chapters this volume curates. In the first instance, it demonstrates a rich humanities tradition of constructive critique, as 'official' communications around 'staying home', 'keeping distance', safety on buses, lateral flow testing, and vaccine hesitancy are tested and interrogated. Through this collective work, we see one of the clear, indisputable values of the humanities; their attentiveness to the human, and the clarifying or reflective power this might have had with greater embeddedness in policy and information design. In the second instance – and frequently both are accomplished in the same short chapter – this volume collects a series of interventions which set out specifically to create and sustain meaning, particularly when dominant cultural narratives over the pandemic rely on those meanings slipping away from political or popular memory. Thus, we have rich and detailed explorations of the experiences of museum workers, people told to 'stay home', older victims of gender-based violence, people with deafblindness, and racialised nurses working in the NHS; as well as extensive reflection on what it was like to make the projects which formalised this knowledge work. Taken as a whole, this volume critiques and redefines pandemic epistemologies, assembling a partial blueprint for making future crises legible.

Finally, *Governance, Democracy and Ethics in Crisis-Decision-Making* explores what it means to be in a situation in which rational or epistemic framings of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on data and scientific ways of knowing the world, rub up against more entangled accounts. In these accounts, humans, the virus and governance arrangements coexist as a broader, relational whole. Human connections, personal fulfilment and social groupings are inextricably intertwined with matters (and meanings) of governance, ethics and authority, the rule of law, the economy and, crucially, public health. Looking at issues ranging from the authority of the WHO and the power of data during an emergency, to the role of public engagement as a source of policy evidence, we reflect on what it means to govern *ethically* in a pandemic, and whether the expected standards and norms of public life, evidence and decision-making should be different in times of crisis. We also reflect on how the long tail of the pandemic seems impossible to disentangle from a reduced trust in power and authority, creating an urgent need for ethics to move beyond normative assertions of the law and regulations. Our authors provide some suggestions as to how these things might be balanced more ethically and effectively in the future.

In 2020 and 2021, when televised government briefings on COVID-19 remained commonplace, ministers insisted time and again that they were 'following the science' (Colman et al., 2021). Even when critics called the accuracy of this rhetorical device into xi

question, they rarely troubled the governing logic that, were we only willing to follow it, scientific and medical evidence offered an unclouded route map through the pandemic. However, '[c]oping with the pandemic was (for the lucky majority who were not severely ill) not so much a medical crisis as an existential one' (Thain et al., 2023: 13); indeed, given the complex interplay of social, cultural, ethical, economic and political framings of health, illness and disease, there is no such thing as a purely medical crisis (Ryan, 2022). The *Pandemic and Beyond* series reveals how the arts and humanities research community rose to the challenge of this complexity, growing in confidence as it became increasingly clear that our methodologies, forms of knowledge and creative mindsets were key not only to tackling this all-encompassing human emergency, but, in so doing, to alleviating human suffering. As one of our researchers commented:

What has been evident across our COVID-19 research projects is that arts-based research methods and approaches can generate much more nuanced narratives, capture the complex experiences and engage people that wouldn't otherwise find research accessible. Whilst of course medical research in such a crisis is fundamental, so too is understanding different people's experiences, responses and how their lives have been impacted so we can make more effective policies and support people's recovery and resilience looking forward. (Aebischer et al., 2022: 30)

If, as another *Pandemic and Beyond* researcher put it, this work 'has been a game-changer' in revealing the skill and generosity of the research community (Aebischer et al., 2022: 29), then it is also a call to action in the future, as we face a multitude of ongoing and emerging crises, from climate to migration and economic decline, which demand collective and civic responsibility and the willingness to continue to combine nuanced and context-sensitive thinking with a solutions-focused approach.

Without the vast collective knowledge, experience, methodological tools and expertise on which this type of research draws, our responses to ongoing challenges and future crises can only ever be impoverished. Expecting politicians of the future to say that they are 'following the humanities' might be wishful thinking. A pandemic response which made more extensive use of the kinds of evidence and interventions on show in these volumes, however, would have been far more attentive to questions of power and justice; understood how, why and when particular people felt – and became – less safe; had a far better handle on how we engage with public health advice or vaccination drives; and begun from a richer knowledge of what the arts can do to keep us feeling human in the most difficult of circumstances. As a recent essay on climate change suggests, the arts and humanities have to be equal to the series of interlocking emergencies which frame our present historical moment (Pietsch and Flanagan, 2020). Over the past three years, scholars and practitioners have painstakingly built a 'pandemic humanities' – and a pandemic arts and cultural sector – which demonstrates that the arts and humanities are more than equal to the task. Creating the conditions for this work to (continue to) thrive must, surely, constitute one of the best forms of crisis preparedness we have.

#### **Notes**

#### **References**

Aebischer, Pascale, *et al.* (2022), *The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery*. Final Project Report. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/132640 (accessed 30 March 2023).

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## **Figures**

Unless otherwise stated, all rights are reserved. For permission to reproduce any of these images please contact the rightsholder.

## **Contributors**

**Pascale Aebischer** is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. She is a specialist in performance technologies who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, worked on Digital Theatre Transformation (AHRC) and took on the leadership of an interdisciplinary team at the University of Exeter for The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery (AHRC-funded project). Building on this work, she is now Co-Lead, with Karen Gray (University of Bristol), of the British Academy-funded Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from COVID-19 project (2023–2024).

**Alison Blunt** is Professor of Geography at Queen Mary University of London, Co-Director of the Centre for Studies of Home (a partnership between Queen Mary and the Museum of the Home) and was Principal Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories. Her recent publications include, with Robyn Dowling, *Home* (Routledge, 2022, 2nd edition).

**Josefina Bravo**, PhD, is a practising information designer and Lecturer at the University of Reading, UK. In her practice and research, she has focused on the design of user-friendly health information, emergency information and education materials. She is particularly interested in user instructions and the range of visual techniques that can be used to enable comprehension of instructional text.

**Kathy Burrell** is Professor of Migration Geographies at the University of Liverpool, UK, and was a Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories. She is currently working on a British Academy-funded project on Polish experiences of the post-Brexit Settled Status regime, as well as researching the UK's refugee hosting programme Homes for Ukraine.

**Fred Cooper** is a historian of loneliness and shame, presently working at the University of Bristol as a Senior Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded Epistemic Injustice in Health Care project (EPIC). With Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose, he co-authored *Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and was Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19.

**Elizabeth Crooke** is Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies at Ulster University, UK, and Principal Investigator of the UKRI-funded project Museums, Crisis and Covid19: Vitality and Vulnerabilities. Her research focuses on what museums bring to society and how we engage with them.

**Luna Dolezal** is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter, UK. She is Principal Investigator of the Shame and Medicine Project (2020–2025), funded by the Wellcome Trust. She collaborated with Arthur Rose and Fred Cooper on the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project (2020–2022), funded by the AHRC, and they co-authored the book *Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

**Alexander Edwards** has a background in fundamental immunology combined with expertise in biochemical engineering. He is an interdisciplinary researcher focused on solving current and future healthcare challenges by combining the latest biology, biochemistry, chemistry and physics. Working at the interface between academic technology discovery and industrial development, he has experience of both fundamental science and the commercialisation of new technology, especially in the area of clinical diagnostic.

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**Azadeh Emadi** is a Senior Lecturer and video maker at the University of Glasgow, UK (Film and TV Department). Her scholarly and creative work intends to address socio-environmental issues and create space for cultural dialogues by investigating digital materiality and perception, visual aesthetics, alternative approaches to image making and technologies of perception.

**Georgina Endfield** is Professor of Environmental History and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for the Research Environment and Postgraduate Research at the University of Liverpool, UK. She was Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Councilfunded project Stay Home Stories and is currently working on a book on societal relationships with the weather through time in a UK context.

**David Farrell-Banks** is a Practitioner Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK. His work explores the personal, political and affective role of the past on present-day lived experience.

**Ken Fero**, PhD, is Assistant Professor at the Research Centre for Global Education at Coventry University, UK, as well as the Director of Migrant Media, a radical documentary film collective working on issues of race, class and resistance.

**Des Fitzgerald** is Professor of Medical Humanities and Social Sciences in the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Ireland. His most recent book is *The City of Today Is a Dying Thing* (Faber and Faber, 2024).

**Karen Gray** is a researcher with a particular interest in work at the intersection between culture, health and wellbeing. She is currently Senior Research Associate at the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. During the pandemic she worked on the Impacts of COVID-19 on the UK Cultural Sector (AHRC) project with the Centre for Cultural Value, as well as The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery (AHRC-funded). In 2023–2024 she built on this experience, co-leading with Pascale Aebischer the British Academy-funded project Pandemic Preparedness in the Live Performing Arts: Lessons to Learn from COVID-19.

**Amanda Holt** is Professor of Criminology at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. Her research work focuses on families, young people and harm and she has published widely on topics concerned with parenting and youth justice, family violence and homicide and research methodologies. Her books include *Adolescent-to-Parent Abuse: Current Understandings in Research, Policy and Practice* ( Policy Press, 2013) and the edited collection *Working with Adolescent Violence and Abuse towards Parents: Approaches and Contexts for Intervention* (Routledge, 2016). She is a Trustee of Family Lives, the national family support charity.

**Paul Hurley** is an artist-researcher working inside and outside of universities. He specialises in creating qualitative, participatory and artistic research and engagement projects, and is interested in exploring human–non-human entanglements, whether they are microbes, laboratory animals or postnature wildlife. While Paul's roots are in the fields of Performance and Participatory Art and More-than-Human Geographies, he is currently working with the Centre for Higher Education Practice at the University of Southampton, UK, creating programmes in researcher development.

**Miri Lawrence** is a Rabbi and researcher. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories, and Curator of Liberal Judaism's Lily's Legacy Project.

**Jess Moriarty** is Principal Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Brighton, UK, and Co-Director of its Centre for Arts and Wellbeing. She is course leader for the Creative Writing BA, English Language and Creative Writing BA, English Literature and Creative Writing BA and for the Creative Writing MA. Jess's research focuses on autoethnography, community engagement and pedagogy in writing practice. She has published extensively on creative writing pedagogy, autoethnography and community engagement. Her current book (with Christina Reading), *Walking for Creative*  xxi

*Recovery* (Triarchy Press, 2022) adopts an autoethnographic approach and explores creative practice as a method for supporting wellbeing.

**Lesley Murray** is Professor in Spatial Sociology at the University of Brighton, UK, where her research centres on urban mobilities. Lesley has published extensively in the field of mobilities; topics include the intersections between mobile and visual methods and gendered mobilities, children's mobilities. She has co-authored a book on *Children's Mobilities* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and co-edited five transdisciplinary collections: *Mobile Methodologies* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); *Researching and Representing Mobilities* (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); *Intergenerational Mobilities* (Routledge, 2016); *Families in Motion* (Emerald Publishing, 2019); and *Sensory Transformations* (Routledge, 2023).

**Eithne Nightingale** is a writer, film maker and researcher. She was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories and directed the related podcasts and films. Her book *Child Migrant Voices in Modern Britain: Oral Histories from 1930s to the Present Day* (Bloomsbury, 2024) was based on her PhD research on child migration undertaken at Queen Mary University of London.

**Alastair Owens** is Professor of Historical Geography at Queen Mary University of London and was a Co-Investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories. He is currently working on a book about the response of Church of England clergy living and working in urban parishes to the so-called 'crisis' of the British inner city in the late twentieth century

**Anandi Ramamurthy** is Professor of Media and Culture at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her research explores questions of race and representation in British and global cultures using an interdisciplinary approach. She was the Principal Investigator for the UKRI/AHRC- funded project Nursing Narratives: Racism and the Pandemic. Her previous books include *Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising* (Manchester University Press, 2003); *Black Star: Britain's Asian Youth Movements* (Pluto Press, 2013); *Struggling to Be Seen: The Travails of Palestinian Cinema* (Daraja, 2020; with Paul Kelemen).

**Caroline Redhead** is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, part of the Law Department at the University of Manchester. Having worked as a commercial solicitor for many years, in the UK and in Hong Kong, she moved from private practice to academia in 2020. Her research interests lie broadly in the dynamic interplay between law, ethics (particularly bioethics) and social change.

**Emma Roe** is a transdisciplinary scholar and Professor of More-than-Human Geographies in the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Southampton, UK. Current research addresses steps towards a net zero agro-food system; tackling the rise in anti-microbial resistance and other microbial risks in and beyond the food system; and laboratory animal care, breeding and supply practices. Emma is often found working with those outside her discipline and with community and industry partners. She is the co-author of *Food and Animal Welfare* (Bloomsbury, 2018), and co-editor of *Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds* (Routledge, 2018) and *Researching Animal Research* (Manchester University Press, 2023).

**Arthur Rose** is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, where he contributes to the Shame and Medicine Project, funded by the Wellcome Trust. Together with Fred Cooper and Luna Dolezal, he worked on the AHRC-funded project Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 (2020–2022), for which they coauthored the book *Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK* (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).

**Melanie Smallman** is Associate Professor in Science and Technology Studies and Co-Director of the Responsible Research and Innovation Hub at University College London (UCL). Melanie's research looks at the role of science and innovation (particularly data-technologies

#### *Contributors* xxxiii

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and artificial intelligence [AI]) in increasing inequality, and how the social impacts of these technologies can be included in ethical and policy considerations.

**Victoria Tischler** is Professor of Behavioural Science in the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Surrey, UK. She is a Chartered Psychologist and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Her research focuses on creativity and mental health and multisensory (especially olfactory) approaches to promoting healthy ageing. She has expertise in medical and health humanities and on untrained (outsider) art.

**Charlotte Veal**, PhD, is a Lecturer in Landscape in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape and Co-Director of The Landscape Collaboratory at Newcastle University, UK. She has an accelerating international research profile for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of bodies, performance and (bio-) security. Her research into interspecies relations (virus, seaweed) is underpinned by post-humanist and post-structuralist thinking in conjunction with experimental creative-arts methods with transdisciplinary audiences.

**Jacky Waldock** is Faculty Impact Fellow and Deputy Director of the Centre for Arts, Society and the Environment at the University of Liverpool, UK. She was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories. She is a specialist in sonic studies, researching sonic place-making and listening cultures in the home and has published a number of essays and articles on these topics.

**Sue Walker** is Professor of Typography at the University of Reading, UK. She has a longstanding interest in the history, theory and practice of information design. Her current research involves interdisciplinary working in communication design for antimicrobial resistance and in adolescent mental health, science communication for young people and COVID-19 rapid-response projects on home-testing.

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#### xxxiv *Contributors*

**Annabelle Wilkins** is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Nordforskfunded Making It Home project at Kingston University London, and was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project Stay Home Stories. She is the author of *Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London* (Routledge, 2019).

**Sandra Wilks** is Associate Professor at the University of Southampton, UK, with more than 20 years' experience in the field of applied biofilm research, including highly interdisciplinary projects on food protection and medical device use and design. She has a particular interest in understanding the complexity of microbial communities, how to detect low levels of pathogens, and how we can communicate and gain a better understanding of microbial risk.

## Introduction – Knowing COVID-19: The pandemic and beyond

*Fred Cooper and Des Fitzgerald*

In April 2021, the UK Government announced that free lateral flow tests (LFTs) for COVID-19 were to be made available to the public through pharmacies and test centres, following several months of trials in schools and universities. The announcement came on the heel of a growing realisation, through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, that large numbers of people with the virus experienced no symptoms at all, or mild symptoms that could be difficult to discern from seasonal influenza or the common cold. This posed a problem during a period when, in many countries, pandemic governance was still operating through a strategy of isolation and containment, at least formally: without regular mass testing, significant numbers of people would continue to avoid quarantine or self-isolation, and thus spread infection. LFTs – cheaper, quicker and easier to use than the more reliable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests used at official testing sites – were a plausible part of the answer. Additionally, in a comparative international context where poor pandemic planning and a series of government omissions and miscalculations had resulted in high rates of infection and death, a mass testing programme framed by hyperbolic rhetoric was a means for the UK Government to save face (Cooper et al., 2023). Indeed, as some pointed out at the time, the relatively high number of false negative results may well have made the tests very possibly inappropriate for home use – leading to a conclusion that what was at stake was much more political posturing than any concerted attempt at pandemic management (see Bunn, 2021).

LFTs went on to become one of the truly iconic technologies of the pandemic. In many places, people became wearyingly familiar with the small rectangular bars of mostly white, and vaguely clinical, plastic, dipped in the middle to provide visual access to a results strip. This strip, in turn, was usually marked with a letter C (for control) about a third of the way down, and a T (for test) a further third of the way down. There was a pencil-tip-sized hole for the user's saliva at one end, and a (frequently disregarded) identifying number or barcode to report the result on the other. Despite multiple manufacturers and different waves of distribution, these essentials never changed much. During peaks of infection over subsequent months, social media users' feeds were often overtaken by friends' and acquaintances' images of their just-used LFTs. One red line (at C) usually produced something like wry relief, uncertainty (given the unreliability of the tests) or even joy; while the dreaded second T line, denoting a positive result, often led to a shared sense of anxiety or concern – for some, indeed, a deep and justified fear – but also, sometimes, a dark humour too.

The lateral flow test, we can say now with some perspective, has been one of the major sources through which the pandemic became quite literally *known* to many people, at both individual and collective scales. It was a cheap, mass-produced, visually oriented medical device; a product through which the presence (or absence) of COVID-19 became briefly legible to a population mostly with no clinical or diagnostic training. Indeed, between the saliva-hole and the thin red line(s), the test became something like what is known in Science and Technology Studies (following Bruno Latour) as a black box – an artefact in which a whole range of social and technical controversies are neatly packed away and rendered invisible. The red lines denoting the result were all that came to matter – both technically and politically (see Latour, 1987). Indeed, the visual charisma of the LFT's signalling system (the red lines blooming and fading; sometimes appearing and disappearing as infection waxes and wanes) trades quite explicitly on this shifting, contingent relationship between what may or may not be knowable, as well as what we may be called upon to do (as both epidemiological and political actors) in the wake of that knowledge.

There is, of course, an extensive literature on the production of visual technology in science and medicine, as cinematic techniques, screen-based media, medical devices and subsequent forms of data visualisation came together to make the body and its pathologies knowable (see e.g. Cartwright, 1995; Halpern, 2014). As Lisa

Cartwright among others has convincingly shown, representations of the body are now deeply entwined in the visual culture of the life sciences, as well as the very different technologies that make this culture possible. We might well analyse the LFT through this history and take it as a point from which to make sense of the visual culture of public health in a pandemic era. We might think carefully through questions of usability, shape, legibility, display and communication, to attach this performatively banal and clinical object, with its sad little paper-strip heart, to a wider literature on biomedicine's investment in visual reason. This would, of course, be a worthwhile project – and one, indeed, likely underway somewhere as we write.

And yet, as Sue Walker, Josefina Bravo and Al Edwards make clear in their contribution to this volume (Chapter 3), these questions of the knowable and the legible, as they were embodied quite precisely in the LFT, were not at all confined to researchers in the medical or life sciences. Or, to put it otherwise: to the extent that the LFT is what the historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) calls an epistemic thing, a site of unknowability within a carefully constructed technical apparatus, then the people constructing that apparatus are not only people with engineering and diagnostic expertise. There are also people with deep expertise in information and communication design; in what we know about the visual organisation of text; in research on how best to illustrate the action designated by an instruction like 'rotate'. There are people with expertise in the history and sociology of how colours work across and between cultures; in how you know whether people actually followed (or didn't follow) an instruction in practice; in the multiple ways that bureaucratic and legal hurdles might constrain how a product could be narrated; and in the basic methodological questions of how to run a successful stakeholder workshop. Which is to say that a great deal of the technical expertise that makes the test possible is expertise that we would usually associate with 'the humanities' (or perhaps with the humanities and social sciences). If we are to understand the sites of technical expertise that are holding the LFT together as a diagnostic object, if we open up the black box, as Latour has it, then we will quickly find ourselves out of the laboratory and the engineering workshop, and instead in the design studio, in the participant workshop, talking to the artist, ringing the anthropologist, checking with the lawyer, or trying to find a translator. What we very quickly realise – what, indeed, *was* realised, in the early stages of the pandemic – is that if we want to know how well a scientific apparatus works, we don't only need to know how reliably a red line at 'T' signals a true result. We need to know how real human beings – in their kitchens, surrounded by empty cereal bowls and children's toys, under pressure to go into work, not at all used to administering their own diagnostic tests, perhaps confused and a little irritated, and likely not feeling so great – are actually going to interpret, make sense of and render knowable the lines (or lack of them) on the strip.

This relationship between humanities research and knowledge is what draws the chapters in this volume together. The authors below (and the projects they discuss) are united by a shared commitment to making the COVID-19 pandemic knowable. But they enact this commitment not in a secondary or reactive sense – for example, in historical or sociological reflection on how epidemiology or the life sciences produced knowledge of COVID – but in the primary sense of figuring out how humanities expertise can be a part of producing new knowledge on a novel infectious disease. Each chapter in this volume reports from a project that brought this expertise to bear on one or more knotty questions of what we knew or didn't know about COVID-19 and its impact: whether this was how to communicate risks on public transport; how deafblind people were going to navigate a world without touch; how racism in the health service was likely to impact on differential exposure to illness and disease; or how people would bear, experientially, a sudden injunction to 'stay home'. Most particularly, in the context of an official pandemic response which was frequently characterised by an inattention to, sometimes a knowing neglect of, pressing questions of complexity and justice, scholars in a number of different disciplinary contexts initiated programmes of work which set out explicitly to compensate for these epistemic, practical and ethical shortcomings. Humanities researchers, far from a relationship with crisis characterised by temporally removed attempts to make meaning, or by oblique and slow pathways to impact, have been right in the thick of things, bringing their expertise and training to bear on some of the most critical epistemic and *technical* questions at the heart of the pandemic. In the case of the lateral flow test – but

also far more broadly – humanities research ceases to be a set of stories about meaning and experience; it is rather a set of critical, technical and rigorous procedures through which we come to know what is happening to our bodies, precisely at the moment of crisis, and according to which we might begin to take reparative (or other) action.

This transformation implies some important consequences, both for how we think about an infectious disease pandemic and how we think about the humanities. First, although COVID has been mediatised since its emergence almost exclusively as a clinical and scientific problem – think of sombre announcements by political figures flanked by senior medics, perhaps with that now overfamiliar red and grey pinhead characterisation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus hovering somewhere in the background – it is now clear that this framing fundamentally misunderstood both the disease and the pandemic we would come to know. Even at the very moment of emergence, which was marked by outbreaks of anti-Chinese racism and violence in multiple places, as well as a consumer rush for scarce goods like hand sanitiser and toilet rolls, it was clear that knowing COVID – as both a pathological agent and an event – was going to require much more than medical expertise. This was partly because, far from pronouncing from a mountaintop, 'science' and 'medicine' rapidly and unwittingly reiterated themselves as messy, human activities, capable of generating as much uncertainty and ambiguity as concrete knowledge. In the UK, for example, an odd, self-appointed 'Independent SAGE' group established itself as a critical shadow of the government's official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, amid claims that the latter was untransparent and politically compromised. But the need and desire for knowledge that was more-than-medical also came from a frank awareness that the things we needed to know about COVID-19 required a different expertise and skillset; it required, for example, knowledge of the relationship between crisis, confinement and the likelihood of gender-based violence; it meant knowledge of the reasons why trying to prevent infection by deploying shame might have very bad unintended consequences; it meant knowing what happens every day in a place like a museum, or a hospital, and how people working in these institutions can sometimes play an unsung role in the production and management of public feeling.

This work necessitated a temporal shift. For scholars doing the kind of work we gather together here – which is only a small slice of the critical humanities research that took place, in a similar spirit, in and around the pandemic – interpretation and meaning were no longer operationalised in reflective mode, or when the dust settled. Rather, they were instruments for making the crisis visible and resolvable, even as it was underway. This meant not only moving from a backwards-looking reflective stance to in-the-moment knowledge production, but also a shift in the time of research itself (Baraitser and Salisbury, 2020). Making an ongoing infectious disease crisis knowable meant setting aside longstanding commitments of many in the humanities community to *slow* research, to sometimes painstaking textual or archival methods, to checking, doublechecking and triple-checking sources, to envisioning research impact over a span of many years – and a turn instead to approaches that were often immediate, scrappy, messy. And if we don't wish to revive, too much, a dusty cliché about slow-moving humanities professors poring over their equally dusty books (this, of course, has long been upended not least by scholars in environmental and medical humanities, in Black humanities, in computational humanities, among many other areas), we nonetheless argue that there is something distinctive about humanities researchers working in this crisis mode to make a health crisis knowable and visible, however imperfectly, with whatever tools they had to hand. This volume resists, therefore, a broader political project of devaluation aimed at the humanities; such a project, we argue, is inextricable from the governmental failures at knowledge-building – and harm reduction more broadly –that many of our chapters trace.

That last reference to tools is a reminder, finally, of another distinctive feature of these chapters, which is their relationship to methodological and technical innovation. In the chapters that follow, such innovation ranges from the use of animation to help bus passengers make sense of their exposure to the virus while getting around on public transport; to collaborating with user communities and engineers to create a wearable headset that would make a newly touchless environment perceptible to deafblind people; to using experimental film methods that foreground participation and the archiving of experience, in order to make a film that doesn't simply record experiences of racism, but becomes a

site for political action and change. What is critical here is that none of these innovations, collaborations or novel methodological decisions are made for their own sake – it's not a facile logic of novelty that animates these projects. Rather, each chapter shows how the different authors filled the methodological gap between the expertise, knowledge and skills they had, on the one hand; and the need to make – with some rapidity – the unknowable known, on the other. This might mean drawing in new collaborators, risking a half-understood engagement with a technical object near to hand, or committing project resources (time, money, credibility) to some new technique with outputs that were, as yet, uncertain. There is here again a risk of drawing comparison with a now outmoded vision of humanities research, which in fact has been open to technological development and interdisciplinarity for some time (and indeed has been rendered open to this vision, whether it wishes it or not, by the remorseless financial and epistemic logic of the contemporary university). Nonetheless, we *do* want to claim that there is something distinctive in these chapters' willingness to take often rather large methodological risks – a willingness occasioned by the unfamiliar 'crisis' conditions within which the research was being conducted.

Chapter 1 is a critical reflection on a series of public health films created by a research team – Charlotte Veal, Paul Hurley, Emma Roe and Sandra Wilks, in collaboration with the filmmaker, Joseph Turp – on the subject of buses as spaces of morethan-human interactions and relationships, in the context of the COVID-19 virus. Structured as a conversation between Veal and Hurley, the piece focuses on the particular challenge of sensitising users to the unseen movement of microbes, without reproducing stigmatising imaginings of buses and bus travel as inherently or newly dangerous, dirty or contaminated. Equally, as the authors make clear, the project was committed to not representing (human) passengers in ways that either positioned them as threatening or isolated them artificially from non-human worlds. Many bus users, they argue, had already been acting in ways that acknowledge – if not always fully understand – their entanglement with buses as microbial environments, even on the briefest of journeys. In the work they undertook, the problem became one of how to effectively and faithfully communicate a complex set of considerations around communal hygiene and safety, at the same time as ensuring that the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the research were uncompromised (and, indeed, developed) by the expedience of engaging audiences quickly and simply. By choosing to animate non-human elements of the bus (such as grab handles) with eyes and mouths, and overlaying short videos with conversations or monologues recorded by voice actors, the team repurposed a familiar genre for a theme more usually dominated by misleading or jarring characters and visual cues; for example, the 'microbe monster' favoured in advertisements for cleaning products. The seats, handles and windows which structure the environment of the bus became sites for discussion on how we are immersed in microbial worlds, and how the specific threat of COVID-19 within this immersion might be comprehended and forestalled.

In Chapter 2, Azadeh Emadi explores COVID-19 through the testimonies of deafblind people, a group for whom questions of knowledge and communication are frequently at the forefront of everyday navigation and experience. In the context of the pandemic, these questions became increasingly fraught. In the chapter, Emadi assembles a meticulous account of how their own research participants and those of their collaborators use touch to construct images and impressions of other people as well as their physical surroundings. This includes heightened attention to particular sources of information – such as the vibration of feet on a pavement – going far further than a logic of compensation, but instead opening up worlds of perception routinely disregarded by sighted people. With the problem of 'knowing' already seriously in contention, and with significant and systemic pre-existing barriers to relational health very much in place, COVID-19 and its responses structured deafblind people's experiences of public space in unsettling and disorienting ways. How did new rules around social distancing, for example, impact on interactions where touch had previously been key? How did altered uses of space – and an altered spatial relationship with other people – interrupt and distort the tangible and knowable world? Within these questions, Emadi outlines a challenge that moves across and beyond the peculiar circumstances of the pandemic: how to work with deafblind people to create a new technology of perception; in this case, a wearable headset or 'Touch Tool' which uses radar to process the immediate

environment into information accessible to deafblind users. The aim of the Touch Tool is to offer an unobtrusive enhancement to the mosaic of impressions that the project's participants use to visualise objects and people in their surroundings. Research in the humanities, this chapter shows, can be crucial to the development of novel sensory innovations; in making the everyday experiences of deafblind people more problematic, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped provide the rationale for technology with the potential to be genuinely transformative.

Chapter 3 addresses a related but different set of questions around interactions with technology, asking how devices which rapidly became commonplace in the pandemic – in this instance, home (or workplace) lateral flow test (LFT) kits to indicate the presence of viral load – have been used, communicated and understood. Applying evidence from a panel of users and best-practice principles in communication design to the instructions that accompany LFTs, Sue Walker, Josefina Bravo and Al Edwards identify a crucial tension in what comprises 'good' instructions. Regulatory frameworks, the authors note, require compulsory information to be communicated alongside tests; the forms these communications take, however, are shaped by requirements (such as liability management) which are unnecessary for, and at times constraining of, the aim of relating easily comprehensible instructions quickly to almost anyone. 'Good' instructions, here, are a category very much open to contestation and nuance, and the authors assemble a powerful case for what testing instructions rooted in knowledge of how people actually process and respond to those instructions might look like. In some respects, this chapter crystallises one of the central contentions of the volume (and, indeed, the wider series). Amid repeated references to 'following the science' (and statements on the scale of their success), politicians lauded (and extensively funded) mass testing programmes. While enumerations of 'tests distributed' or 'tests traced' were key markers of political value, the unknown – and unknowable – figure of 'tests taken correctly' exerts a greater claim to salience. This figure is contingent, to a considerable degree, on how instructions were communicated and received; and understanding, critiquing and improving these processes is a matter requiring expertise from the arts and humanities. If, as the authors assert, there is likely to be a significant legacy of relatively simple tests taken by laypeople in non-clinical settings (processes already underway, for example, in the management of chronic illness), then the questions they identify here, on how such tests are demonstrated and explained – and how users, consequently, will engage with them – are of decisive importance.

At stake here are questions of communication, which are also a focus for Alison Blunt, Kathy Burrell, Georgina Endfield, Miri Lawrence, Eithne Nightingale, Alastair Owens, Jacqueline Waldock and Annabelle Wilkins, who take as their point of departure the UK Government's injunction to 'stay home', a public health strategy mirrored in a number of international contexts. What kind of home, Chapter 4 provokes us to ask, did these injunctions imagine? And how were homes inhabited or dwelled within, both easily and uneasily, not just as (largely) private households, but as wider emotional geographies which take in streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces? Making extensive use of testimonies taken from a diverse group of participants across the cities of Liverpool and London, the authors analyse how different people in different contexts connected with their surroundings in new ways, developing a firmer sense of place; how they negotiated feelings of loneliness that were rooted to the materiality and geography of home, transforming what might have previously been positive emotions around solitary living; how migration made room for attachments to multiple 'homes', with new barriers to mobility during COVID-19 imposing conflicting feelings of belonging and homesickness; how (even just visual) access to greenery and bodies of water made seclusion more bearable; and how racist attributions of the spread of disease pulled relatively secure feelings of home into crisis. In creating the conditions for home-workers, unemployed people and people on furlough to speak back to the injunction to 'stay home', the authors work towards a speculative and capacious idea of what home is and could be, in and for public health. In so doing, this chapter suggests that the diversity, complexity and inequity of experiences of home have to be taken seriously in future public health messages and interventions. Responses to new crises which rely on a homogenised and sanitised vision of home, and which ask us to 'stay home' without any deeper interrogation of what that might mean, will be insufficient to address both primary and secondary sources of harm.

Chapter 5 moves beyond our focus – broadly on technology and communication – up to this point, alighting on the specific context of the museum sector to untangle the role of emotions about and at work in the particular challenges faced by managers, curators, visitor guides and front-of-house staff. While this is in part an analysis of sectoral adaptation and adversity, Elizabeth Crooke and David Farrell-Banks, focusing empirically on Northern Ireland, move between macro- and microscopic lenses, using oral testimonies to explore complex emotional, political, economic and social situations and processes (such as furlough, precarity and shifting professional identities). COVID-19, the authors argue, exposed deep and long fissures in the museum sector; both individual and institutional priorities were crystallised by the pressures of shifting museums from physical to online spaces, collecting pandemic artefacts as a direct act of history-making and memorialisation, and continuing to offer formal and informal systems of care to audiences and staff. For Crooke and Farrell-Banks, the emotional attachment that museum staff had to their work – though not an unclouded phenomenon – acted primarily as a protective factor in navigating professional, personal and political changes and uncertainties. A renewed sense of purpose, too, could work against the nexus of painful emotions, such as loneliness, fear, anxiety and grief, which were wider products of the pandemic and the UK Government's preparedness and response. Amid attempts by the workers they interview to assemble a collective archive of the pandemic, Crooke and Farrell-Banks take the processes of collection and curation – and the welter of emotions, experiences and feelings that surround them – as the subject of their own project of preservation, ensuring that they are not simply allowed to fade from view.

Where earlier – and later – chapters in this volume address the novel context of COVID-19, Lesley Murray, Amanda Holt and Jessica Moriarty's Chapter 6 repositions our understanding of crisis in relation to the pandemic, posing it instead as a watershed moment in bringing previously ignored stories of suffering to the surface. The authors argue that the much-reported spike in genderbased violence (GBV) at the beginning of the pandemic allows for a more widespread – but still partial – questioning of whom GBV narratives exclude and make invisible. With GBV against women over the age of 50 frequently (mis)categorised as elder abuse (a conceptual framework that, the authors argue, misses important nuances in gender, power and mobility), this chapter identifies a narrative vacuum around older victims of GBV, with serious cultural, individual and legal consequences. While their broader research mobilises creative methodologies to encourage such stories to emerge, Murray, Holt and Moriarty's contribution to this volume focuses on two composite narratives of women in their eighties, assembled from multiple testimonies collected by the charity AGE UK. These stories draw together complex themes of abuse, control and constraint, first in a long narrative of physical and emotional violence over 57 years of marriage, and secondly in a shorter scenario of an abusive adult child returned to the family home. With COVID-19 present as the catalyst for these stories (but not their context), we can only speculate on how these dynamics might have contorted or sharpened, as – among a number of other determinants which make GBV more likely – physical proximity was increasingly enforced. Murray, Holt and Moriarty's chapter can also be read as a companion piece to Chapter 4 on the subject of home; indeed, it would be hard to draw out how the vision of home-as-sanctuary implicit in public health communications could be more strikingly subverted and compromised.

The problem of finding ways to preserve and communicate experiences which might otherwise have been rendered invisible is also a major focus of Anandi Ramamurthy and Ken Fero's Chapter 7 on 'obstinate memory'. Reflecting on the theories and methods behind their 2022 documentary, *Exposed*, on Black, Brown and migrant nurses and midwives' experiences of racism, the authors show how longer histories of racism in the National Health Service (NHS) were reformulated within the specific contingencies of COVID-19. Exposure, here, takes on several meanings: in the ways that racialisation contributed to how health workers were put in the way of viral and psychological harm; in the value of a 'documentary of force' approach in bringing such harms to light; and in the vulnerability of telling painful stories, and being cast in the difficult role of complainant. By attending closely to pasts and futures, Ramamurthy and Fero add new dimensions to what – at least for readers of other chapters in this volume – will be an increasingly familiar story. In their nuanced and perceptive piece, the COVID-19 pandemic stands not as something wholly new, but

as a crisis which has landed in ways that follow deep and wide fault lines that were already well established in the UK in 2019. Anti-racist humanities work, their research attests, is sorely needed in the present: to untangle how structural racism (and the systemic devaluation of Black and Brown lives) plays out in specific institutional cultures and contexts, becoming encoded in responses to new emergencies and disasters. Their research also shows the power of creating an archive for, and a documentary to convey, testimonies which show precisely how this has occurred, in order to work backwards against racist exposure to multiple harms in future iterations of an NHS both in and out of crisis. Obstinate memory, this chapter suggests, is a technique not just of recognition, but of survival.

Chapter 8 in this volume, Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose's essay on vaccine shaming, also takes sight at how particular lives and deaths have been invested with varying degrees of value (Fred Cooper is additionally an editor of the present volume, and an author of this introduction). Although there is a shared border here – vaccine uptake has usually been lower in racialised groups, in part because of a historical (and understandable) lack of trust in medical interventions and services – this chapter is concerned with acute (rather than chronic) dynamics of shame and marginalisation. What happens, the authors ask, when a shamed population is rapidly brought into being, specifically around non-conformity to public health initiatives; when members of that group are subsequently held accountable for a raft of negative outcomes (high infection and mortality rates, ongoing restrictions to everyday life and their own suffering and death); and when a crisis or disaster is publicly seen to be primarily affecting people who share culpability for their own illness? Bringing their research on shame and shaming into close proximity with Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics and Judith Butler's work on grievability, Cooper, Dolezal and Rose explore how shameful deaths are created and discussed, and the kinds of political decisions and omissions they make possible. COVID-19, they argue, significantly raised the stakes on vaccine 'hesitancy' and 'refusal', with public health communications on vaccination often heightening the burden of shame. In this context, internet users made new, 'anti-persuasive' forums, in the form of online spaces to shame and deride notable anti-vaxxers who had subsequently contracted COVID-19 and died, assembling in the process an accidental archive of the experience of dying of the disease. Beyond the immediate context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter sensitises us to the complex workings of shame, and the damaging consequences of public health messaging which sets out to leverage this difficult emotion. Future pandemics will require mass vaccination programmes, and not everyone will co-operate. Likewise, other emergencies will be inflected with differing valuations of life. As normative judgements over 'good' and 'bad' behaviour are heightened, shame is likely to play a significant part.

The chapters that follow are in some ways a record of what it meant to do humanities research at a moment of crisis – to, in some cases, wholly re-orient an existing research agenda towards an asyet-uncovered piece of the pandemic puzzle. There will be space in the years ahead for thinking more carefully – perhaps more critically – about the epistemic politics of this moment, and the inevitable instrumentalisation of research agendas that it entailed. In this volume, however, and in its companions, we want to make space for recording the rigorous epistemological force of the humanities during COVID-19. While the focus of this series of volumes has necessarily been on work (primarily) taking place in the humanities, for reasons detailed at length in the preface, it nonetheless takes sight at disciplinary practices with fluid and porous borders, and resonance far beyond the spaces they originated in; most notably, we suspect, for scholarship in public health and science and technology studies. This is a diverse and eclectic set of chapters pitched at a broad readership, intended to provide a frame of reference for research on COVID-19 – and emerging or ongoing crises and their epistemologies – well into the future. At a time of ongoing political and bureaucratic attack – as we write, some hundreds of humanities colleagues in the UK alone are under threat of redundancy, while early career colleagues are casually tossed aside – this volume also stands as a testament to what humanities research can do, what it *does* do, acknowledging the expertise, care and skill that scholars in philosophy, literature studies, history, media, human geography and so many other areas used to make the pandemic knowable.

#### **References**

## Pandemic imaginaries of interspecies relatedness: More-than-human microbial methods on the bus

#### *Charlotte Veal, Paul Hurley, Emma Roe and Sandra Wilks*

The study of human–non-human relations, within a conceptual framework that decentres human exceptionalism (Menon and Karthik, 2017) and challenges the nature–society separation with its legacy of presenting the natural world as somehow 'out there', has gained traction within the social sciences and humanities (Büscher, 2022; Greco, 2022; Haraway, 2016; Whatmore, 2006; 2017). This body of work has started to reconceive ecological politics through mapping out how humans are situated in complex social relations with biological and physical worlds. Lively discussions have ensued, foregrounding multispecies geographies (Gillespie and Collard, 2015), vitalist ecologies (Bennett, 2010; Braun, 2015), and post-humanist theorising of more-than-human entanglements (Anderson, 2014; Wolfe, 2010). Within this field, the study of human–non-human relations has been dominated by well-established cultural interest areas; for example, animals, foodstuff and plants. There is also work that engages with non-human aspects of planetary life that is harder to grapple with due to the temporality, spatiality and inhuman materiality of multispecies worlds, such as the geological (Clark and Yusoff, 2017). Social studies of the microbial sit between these points of human–nonhuman scholarship. Viruses, bacteria, archaea, fungi and protists are methodologically trickier to study within social relations as they are challenging to witness as material, recognisable everyday objects in relation to human practices. And yet the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how the very real threat of infection was accompanied by multifarious imaginings of microbial agency and risk that radically changed everyday life.

Over the last two decades, social and economic anxieties associated with antimicrobial resistance, food and zoonotic disease risk, as well as the recent pandemic, have prompted a surge in social and cultural studies of the microbial (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008; Hinchliffe et al., 2018; Mather and Marshall, 2011) and the human microbiome (Greenhough et al., 2020). This literature brings attention to the vitality, materiality and dynamism of microbial life, when operating in assemblage with other nonhumans – air, water, architecture, etc., co-producing worlds beyond human control (see Bosco, 2006; Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2017; Whatmore, 2017). Human existence is always a more-than-human achievement (Greenhough, 2014; see also Latour, 1993; Stengers, 1997). Unlike the conceptual and theoretical developments, methodological developments to cater for the challenges of studying specific human–non-human relations have not kept pace. There is urgent need for further development of more-than-human methods that support sensing, understanding and 'doings' *with* microbial worlds, to add to existing work in this field (Dowling et al., 2017; see also Adams et al., 2021; Buller, 2015; Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Swanson, 2017). This chapter addresses this absence, outlining the critical imperative for methodological innovation capable of advancing novel representations and literacies around interspecies relatedness.

Amidst calls to develop new techniques that 'allow us to engage with diverse and multiple worlds and non-human agencies' (Greenhough, 2014: 101), this chapter advances a more-thanhuman microbial methodology, using the example of public health videos created during the recent pandemic. Taking the lead from geography's 'creative turn' in research methods (Veal and Hawkins, 2020), the more-than-human microbial methodology presented here draws on three bodies of literature: filmmaking as research; affect theory; and artistic microbial methods. Participatory videos and filmmaking can work against and beyond text (Garrett, 2011; Jacobs, 2013) and are argued to better attune to the more-thanhuman dimensions of life (Lorimer, 2010; Richardson-Ngwenya, 2014). Others have put forward affect and emotion as informing cognition, behaviours and socio-political interactions in ways that may not be fully perceptible (Anderson, 2006; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). Affect is central to the production of 'non-human charisma' (Lorimer, 2017) while emotions shape human relations to worlds unseen but sensed (Roe et al., 2021). Scholarly interest in the unfolding of social worlds through emotions, affects, practices and multisensual forces has found synergies with artistic approaches to microbial research that illustrate other ways of knowing and communicating the micro-scale (see Evans and Lorimer, 2021; Macduff et al., 2017). An important contribution from Roe et al. (2019) foregrounds aesthetics and imaginaries in illustrating microbial interactions *with* humans in the act of infection. Such work advocates for non-anthropogenic modes of researching *with* microbial worlds and attending to the material and imaginative, subtle and dynamic, forces they engineer (see Hinchliffe et al., 2005). The COVID-19 pandemic signals a critical imperative to develop microbial literacy (see Timmis et al., 2019). By microbial literacy the authors refer to the social and cultural knowledges and values that shape non-specialist publics' *encounters* with medico-scientific information about microbial communities and their risk. And it involves attuning to how individuals and different community groups (whether by age, race, ethnicity, class, etc.) *apply* information about microbial risk (hazard identification, sources of infection, strategies of prevention, care of self or other, etc.) to their routines and practices in ordinary settings and everyday life.

The main portion of this chapter is framed around a conversation that took place on the video calling platform Zoom between co-investigator and artist-academic Paul Hurley (PH) and co-investigator and landscape scholar Charlotte Veal (CV) in April 2022 as part of the project Routes of Infection, Routes to Safety: Understanding Risk and the Viral Imagination on Public Transport; they are two members of a four-person research team. The other two members were principal investigator and cultural geographer Emma Roe and co-investigator and microbiologist Sandra Wilks. The thoughts and ideas expressed in Veal and Hurley's conversation reflect and relay hours of discussion between the whole team during the project. Roe and Wilks have co-authored ideas central to this chapter, discussed and edited it. Work on developing this chapter was part of the post-research reflection, evaluation and project write-up phase that included a stakeholder report (Roe et al., 2021), participatory workshops with research participants

and an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) evaluative summary. A reflexive conversation, central to the collaborative model of working throughout the project, seemed an appropriate written form to share the team's methodological experimentations. Deliberately dialogical, the chapter raises questions about how stories of the trials and tribulations of research, particularly in fastpaced and fluctuating socio-political and scientific contexts, are told. Lightly edited, the format is also intended to be provocative and free flowing, creating a *reflective* exploratory space to think about and push thinking on the more-than-human and microbial methods specifically.

Routes to Safety's aim was to understand the personal application of infection prevention measures beyond clinical settings and to build confidence in bus travel during a time when public transport use was being discouraged (for example, by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, quoted in Davies, 2020). The field work included ethnography and semi-structured research interviews (between January and October 2021). The team, on the request of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), made a commitment that more than 50 per cent of research participants would be drawn from members of Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities in order to capture the disproportionate impact the pandemic was having on BAME communities (Public Health England, 2020a). Hence, from the outset the team established a collaboration with the Bristol Somali Youth forum who helped recruit from their community. The project concluded with producing four animated films with public health messaging, grouped under the title 'You're Never Alone on the Bus'*,* with filmmaker Joseph Turp.

The chapter reflects on the processes of concept-inception, teamdiscussion and dissemination-reception of these films to/by various audiences. It argues that developing novel representations and literacies around interspecies relatedness in shared public spaces like the bus is vital to facilitating new understandings not only of human– microbial relations in the context of COVID-19, but also how more-than-human methods might be applicable to infection prevention campaigns during future public health challenges (winter colds, flu, norovirus) and knowledge-making around other global health challenges such as antimicrobial resistance. It is structured under four sub-headings: context for the film; microbial aesthetics; politics of microbial aesthetics; and scriptwriting, before concluding with a call for critically creative more-than-human microbial methods.

#### **Context for the film**

Charlotte Veal (CV): Paul, let's start with the background context for the public engagement dimension of the research project. This was a dual challenge underscored by UK Government COVID-19 messaging that, from the outset, warned the public against public transport use. On the one hand, many bus users expressed limited microbial literacy. On the other hand, because of a long history of stigmatising the bus as 'dirty' or a space utilised only by lower-income sectors of society (see TfL, 2012), our attempts to address this tension were met by bus operators' reluctance. Operators were hesitant to represent the microbial in their communications about infection prevention measures such as physical distancing, hand hygiene and mask wearing. Can you reflect on how the concept for the film developed within this context and who was involved?

Paul Hurley (PH): So, we had a filmmaker on board from the outset, Joseph Turp. Joe had worked with the research team on Mapping Microbes in 2016; a project that developed creative visualisations of surface transmission and hand hygiene in a mockhospital ward (Roe et al., 2019). Joe was involved in the developmental phase of Routes to Safety and this helped coordinate our thinking on outputs. The team met regularly with Joe to discuss initial findings and how we might translate them into visual and informational materials around infection prevention. Discussions focused on ethnographic findings onboard buses and at bus stops – observing passenger behaviours, social interactions and mundane encounters with bus architecture – as well as initial interviews with bus drivers and bus users (beginning in April 2021).

CV: The creative process was also informed by our own pandemicshaped everyday encounters with infection prevention and protection: by things that we'd heard from friends; by our experiences of relatives being hospitalised and of children being in school; by those daily interactions that felt 'new'; and by the negotiations that we

were having with the 'virus' through ordinary tasks like catching a bus, going to the supermarket or inviting someone into our home.

PH: The ideas for the films came out of our own lived reality that we were simultaneously researching. It was a very dynamic situation and while the team planned to do something like the Mapping Microbes project, it became clear that Routes to Safety needed to look beyond surface transmission to consider airborne transmission. The aesthetic of our UV-lit microbial worlds created during Mapping Microbes also bore an uncanny resemblance to some public information films released by Public Health England (2020b). We pledged to continue innovating rather than to rehearse the same approach.

CV: The creative process also had to engage constructively with people's everyday lived experiences of a rapidly evolving medical and political context and the associated affective and emotional forces cultivated under the framework of government public health messaging which enhanced a sense of risk.

PH: When research began in January 2021, the team had to go through an intensive process of ethical and health and safety approval to travel on buses. It's strange to think now about the intensity of anxiety and perceived risk from boarding a bus. Back then, we were in a very different reality. It was a challenging context to be working in. And yet that challenge also created a richness of disturbance to our conceptual and methodological working from which to creatively respond. The ordinary had been shaken up to such a degree by this unknown microbial non-human that we needed a new method of research. One question the team kept returning to was how to map out the new practices that were ever emerging in this new reality. Unlike the more familiar pathogens we had been thinking with in Mapping Microbes, the scientific understanding of SARS-CoV-2 was ever-evolving.

CV: Did this 'unnerving' and 'new' pandemic context mean that you developed a more experimental relationship to your creative practice as a performance artist and community research facilitator?

PH: There was certainly an unknownness that I and the team were encountering as the once familiar bus environment was rendered strange. Also, hospital infection prevention practices and behaviours we'd previously studied were starting to become more ordinary as people performed and experienced them on the bus. It felt like there was an opportunity to do something different, but we couldn't be as artistically experimental as we might have been, in a less pressured window of time. Tens of thousands of people were dying and this intervention we were trying to make was attempting to seriously address the practices that gave people more susceptibility to contracting the virus, while also helping the country safely get back to more normal levels of social and economic activity.

CV: The starting point for the films was the challenge of representing the SARS-CoV-2 virus in ways that were scientifically sound but equally engaging and accessible. Elsewhere, Bioart has given form to microbes as part of enquiries into biological worlds (Kelley, 2016; Mitchell, 2015) and visualisations have supported pedagogic training among healthcare workers (Macduff et al., 2017). What seemed missing were social *behaviours* in response to microbes.

Looking at the films made (the reader can find them here: www. neveraloneonthebus.org/outputs/), what is striking is the absence of human characters. Instead, the bus architecture does the talking. Where did the idea of bus-architecture characters come from and what was their role in the films?

PH: Experimenting in more-than-human microbial methods was exciting, but also difficult. Part of that difficulty was ethical. When scriptwriting began in spring 2021, restrictions were being eased, the winter lockdown had ended, and face coverings were still advised in many indoor contexts. Older people and those with certain clinical vulnerabilities had been offered the vaccine. But there was beginning to be, as I remember it, more slippage in how guidance and regulations were being communicated and followed. Bus passengers recounted tensions around some people wearing or not wearing masks, some passengers wanting to open the windows while others wanted to close them because it was cold. A key parameter for the team was to not reinforce prejudices around who was performing certain behaviours judged as riskier or behaviours that intensified risks for others. We didn't want to be didactic or judgemental about these practices.

And so, the team asked, 'What *can* we do?' if we don't want to have human characters in the films, if it's not about something like one-upmanship: 'Oh, I'm wearing a mask'. That's quite a simplistic,

potentially problematic and stigmatising scenario to adopt, and attitudes towards mask-wearing were (and remain) fluid. Joe did some initial sketches around the bus itself being a character and Joe and I did some photographic and video experiments at the bus depot, with the bus doors being like the mouth and trying to think of the horizontal opening windows as eyelids. We explored thinking about the architecture of the bus as a character that helped us visualise different kinds of agents, including – drawing upon Haraway (2008) and Whatmore (2006) – non-human agents. The scenario of infection is often framed as being between humans (unwashed hands, coughs and sneezes, poor food preparation), but in this project the research team approached the 'event' of infection as being an encounter between humans, surfaces, air, the virus and other microbes. Each has agency and is actively entangled in the event of transmission or infection (drawing on geographers writing on relations and entanglements; Allen, 2012; Lorimer, 2010; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018).

CV: Anthropomorphic characters such as cartoonish representations of 'germ monsters' are not uncommon in the visual language of public health. What did feel visually new was how the bus characters focused discussions towards *practices* onboard the bus like cleaning or ventilation that affect the atmosphere and environment of the bus. Making characters out of the bus architecture visually detracted responsibility away from the individual human and foregrounded relationality in an ever-evolving bus environment with other humans, non-humans and microbes. This was closer to the socio-technoscientific reality of entangled human relations with complex and diverse microbial communities, rather than a narrative of fixed and oppositional relations represented by the UK Government's (and various strategies taken by devolved nations) attempts to 'control the virus' or to fight a 'war against COVID' (Waylen, 2021: n.p.).

PH: Each of the films – *Fresh Air Shows You Care*, *Use Your Head to Stop the Spread*, *Leave Some Space Just in Case*, and *Keep Your Micro-Passengers to Yourself –* focused on a scenario that had been reported in our interviews, such as sitting next to someone who was coughing or somebody closing the bus window rather than opening it for ventilation. And that's when the bus characters came in – like Sammy STOP Button and Backseat Bob – with supporting human characters who were largely off screen. Joe started writing the scripts and the research team went back and forth, redrafting and editing, via collaborative online documents. Through the bus characters, stories of human–nonhuman interactions were told.

CV: This is particularly evident in one of the films where a trio of grab handles became commentators for the off-screen action of a human walking down the stairs and sneezing (Figure 1.1).

PH: The viewer doesn't see the sneezing human character, but does see the interaction between these non-human characters; this gave a useful distance from the 'responsibilisation of individuals' in transmission of the virus and yet somehow also points to the collective responsibility of bus passengers. Aesthetically it links to a long history in animation – Disney's 1940 *Fantasia*, ITV's 1984 *Thomas the Tank Engine*, Pixar's 2008 *WALL-E –* of objects becoming animated characters, and with the animation style that uses a mixture of hand-drawn and stop motion mixed with live action. The more-than-human methodological approach innovated was driven by a desire to find a format that allowed us to not characterise, or stereotype, the identity of who may be inclined to follow, or not follow, infection prevention advice.

**Figure 1.1** Still from *Use Your Head to Stop the Spread* (short video), part of the 'You're Never Alone on the Bus' series (© 2021 Joseph Turp and Routes to Safety. All rights reserved.)

#### **Microbial aesthetics**

CV: Thinking back to the visual cultures of the pandemic (see Lynteris, 2020: 190) and UK Government public health films especially, the decision *not* to focus on humans was, aesthetically speaking, substantially different. Co-producing four shorter films, however, echoed the stylistics that the various UK regional governments were working with.

PH: To make four shorter films was a practical choice, to do with distribution. If these films were to be shown (as they were) on social media, or on buses, then they needed to be short, because people's viewing concentration is much reduced on those platforms. And while these four films were 'of a piece', part of a series, they also each stood alone. Each has a different story that reinforces a collective message. For example, they certainly started off being very short words, punchy tag lines like 'Hands – Face – Space'.

CV: And there was a simple visual design – icons, simple text – and a limited colour palette like blue and white, connecting to NHS visual design.

PH: By 2021, the various UK goverments started to do longer pieces; some about air and meeting people indoors including one showing a cloud of particles spreading in a room where people were sitting.1 I remember pandemic imagery featured representations of sticky yucky stuff (potential virus on surfaces), of neon clouds or ectoplasm (potential airborne virus) being spread about in a domestic environment. Such images were loaded with affect (unsettling, fear, disgust, etc.) that leveraged emotional reactions conducive to coercing individuals into adopting 'responsible' behaviours through the 'yuk' factor (see Allen, 2021). These were the dominant representations of the virus circulating in the world.

CV: Finding new tools and techniques to communicate nonhuman worlds that affirm their agency without provoking fear and disgust seems like an important step for addressing the lacuna of microbial literacy among non-specialist publics.

PH: In the films in the series, 'Never Alone on the Bus', there's something more light-hearted and immediately kind of playful. A couple of participants said that there's something child-like about the films; like a *Thomas the Tank Engine* world where bits of the bus talk to each other. Perhaps animating the non-human in that way, making that imaginative leap to give the non-human a character, creates a frivolousness or playfulness to it, that was understandably absent from government communications. We would see humans talking, a minister sharing stark messages, and very naturalistic home environments with humans acting in a naturalistic manner with a spooky invisible layer of infection present. Because our team doesn't work for a public health body, we had licence to try to engage people in a different way.

CV: This microbial imaginary equally rejects images of microscopy or anthropomorphic representations of microbial 'monsters' that have historically been mobilised. These, of course, can be helpful, but also affectively alienating and can misinform people about microbial behaviour and how this connects to practices of infection prevention. Can you say something more about the microbial non-human and the practicalities of working on this with Joe?

PH: Alongside animating bus architecture, a key parameter for the films was to visualise the microbial community of the bus, which is both viral and bacterial. The research team's microbiome study (as yet unpublished) evidenced that the types of microbes on the bus are mostly environmental and are not a risk to human health. Nevertheless, these are the microbial things that we are often scared of interacting with because we can't see them. This invisibility felt important. A challenge of the project was that the world, for many, changed radically because of new knowledge of the presence of a non-human agent – SARS-CoV-2. Unless we're microbiologists with a specialised electron microscope and access to the virus we can't see it. Most of us don't really understand what 'it' is or its viral character. This is a real societal challenge. How do we communicate something that people can't understand or get to know using their conventional sensory and talk-based approaches? Yet onboard the bus, people were doing all sorts of things to adapt their practices to the 'unknowable' virus.

CV: The once familiar space was rendered uncanny or distorted – by face masks, signage about where to sit, practices of physical distancing. People's everyday experience of the bus travelling space was altered by an unseen, but sensed, microbial world. For many bus users interviewed, this produced intense feelings of uncertainty that shaped interactions with other passengers, the bus architecture and the possibly present virus.

PH: The team wanted to work with findings from interviews, where passengers, drivers and cleaners were asked how they imagined the virus and how they thought they might catch it. People talked about what they thought the virus wanted, like 'it wants to survive', or 'it wants to infect people'. People were giving the virus agency. Incorporating this in the films in a way that wasn't alarmist was imperative, because one of the research aims was to inspire confidence on the bus. If people are carrying out infection prevention practices, the bus *is* a safe place. If they're not, then that becomes harder to say. We didn't want to reinforce government messaging that was targeting public transport as more risky than other indoor environments.

I remember Sandra Wilks, the microbiologist on the research team, has talked about adverts for domestic cleaning products where you have little 'germ monsters' trying to jump out of toilets, or by contrast adverts for food products that contain 'healthy bacteria' for the gut, visualised by a warm glow. Representing the virus as an individual, whether monster or protector, sat uncomfortably with the more-than-human methodology the research team was developing.

CV: In three of the films, the microbial is hinted at (coughs, sneeze), but it's the fourth – *Keep Your Micro-Passengers to Yourself* – where microbial representations begin to be untethered from this unhelpful good-bug bad-bug dichotomy. Could you explain how you worked aesthetically with the microbial in this film?

PH: A recurring theme of discussion was how to represent *communities* of microbes as biofilms on surfaces or as a combination of different bacteria and viruses and whatever else in the air. This was approached through a visual animation that was layered onto the film afterwards. It was a glittery glow that was around various bus surfaces. And these were also characters.

Lines were introduced into the script about what we called 'micro-pets' or 'micro-passengers' – to point to the invisible microbial communities that live in or on us. The non-human bus characters, like Sammy STOP Button, drawn by our character designer Adriana Meirelles, were aware of the microbial communities living on them. Some characters were happy about those communities and others were less so, which was reflective of human feelings about microbes. This is despite only a small proportion of the microbes in and around us being pathogenic, as our (unpublished) microbiome study results showed. But it was very difficult to bring these perspectives into the film. The fourth film is the one that tries to do that, and that was certainly the one that proved most difficult to write. It was also the film that met a certain amount of resistance from bus industry stakeholders. Bus passengers seemed warmer to it. They got it. But I think bus operators were concerned that this film portrayed buses in a bad light, reinforcing the stigma attached to them as 'dirty' and full of bacteria, which is a story they wanted to avoid. More-than-human methods can provoke thinking on microbial agency, but there are clearly ethical and political considerations when working with various stakeholders.

#### **Politics of microbial aesthetics**

CV: Could you say more about the wider politics of microbial aesthetics?

PH: The films were shot as a series of fixed camera shots of the bus interior, which was brightly lit. The bus company that hosted the filming was keen that we used the new buses. These were very smart and colourful. It's quite clean and bright.  The live action video bits were made up of actors drawn from the research team and research participants who had volunteered to sit in the background to give a sense of movement around the animated characters.

CV: The videos were quite cheery in their aesthetic. Exchanges between the bus architecture characters were conversational and chatty.

PH: This evoked the conviviality that many bus passengers valued but noted was lost during the pandemic. A range of voices was selected for the STOP button, the seat, etc.: different genders and ages, different ethnicities, different regional accents, again reflecting a diverse bus passenger and driver community.

CV: This diversity, from memory, was a response to wider literature that celebrated the bus as a multicultural space – of exchanges

between unacquainted others (see Jensen, 2009; Wilson, 2011) – challenging the narrative of violence and racism on board or the social-spatial inequalities associated with these networks. And yet, interviewees affirmed the social and economic factors that were placing some bodies at greater risk of exposure to COVID-19; buses were a vital resource, transporting key workers to work, and our BAME interviewees to shops and health appointments.

PH: The routes we selected in which to conduct our ethnography also crosscut diverse neighbourhoods to acknowledge these social geographies.

When it came to the animated micro-passengers – an almost glittery sparkly twinkle – we wanted them to have a positive bright affectation, rather than a slimy feeling. It was something lively. It's about giving a sense that there are these communities and these worlds, that we can't see, that exist everywhere, including on the bus, but that's okay.

CV: Were there any concerns around anthropomorphising characters?

PH: The decision was made early on to make parts of the bus architecture characters rather than the microbes. Sammy STOP Button and Backseat Bob were intentionally anthropomorphised. We gave the bus architecture names and characters, knowing that people generally don't think of those things as having characters. Whereas people do think of a virus having a character – a character that was often framed in government messaging as a military adversary. Not anthropomorphising the virus troubles an individualisation of the virus as a monster, a singular 'thing'. That doesn't make sense in microbiological terms nor in how we might think of these communities of microbes and the way they interact with our own microbiome. Using the bus architecture as characters helped to give the film these stories. I am not sure if we did cute-ify them, but they remind me of *Creature Comforts*, an early Aardman Animations film (1989). Using those bits of architecture to tell the story of the human interaction with the microbial felt like a useful device to engage viewers in a story rather than just in an informational message.

CV: There was also something about how the bus characters became observers capable of reflecting on both worlds; the spectator and performer.

PH: In Greek tragedy, you'd have the chorus, or in Shakespearean theatre the narrator, who has greater knowledge of the drama on stage than the characters do. The narrator knows more about what's just happened or what's about to happen. They have this privileged position. I wonder if there's something in how the bus architecture is given a privileged position of knowledge because it can see what humans can't see, and in some of the films, the micro-pets.

#### **Scriptwriting**

CV: Creating public health resources that support confidence in public transport usage was a key aim of the project. What audiences did you trial the films with?

PH: Much of the social science field work involved interviewing bus drivers, bus cleaners and bus users. We chose to interview bus users solely from Bristol's Somali community, prompted by a condition of funding that at least 50 per centof participants originate from BAME groups, and by learning about the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on that community (Sayaqle, 2020). Some interviewees spoke of the challenge of UK Government pandemic communication materials being unavailable in different languages. Producing something that was accessible and that could be subtitled in different languages informed the creative process. The aesthetic was also oriented towards that – to try to be engaging and playful, rather than being reliant on linguistic understanding as the primary communicator. The team hoped the characters would be entertaining and relatable to different audiences. I'm not sure how effective that was because we haven't yet had them translated and subtitled in different languages.

Each of the films ended with a short slogan that relates to what's happened in the film. One film is about two bus seats talking about where passengers sit. At the end of the dialogue, they say, 'give some space, just in case'. This then comes up as a title. Again, when we screened the films with multilingual audiences of different ages, the feedback was that the narratives were engaging and the slogans were memorable.

CV: It feels timely to be exploring how more-than-human methods might support microbial literacy, but doing so in ways that

are sensitive to the differentiated social and cultural understandings of the microbial, cleanliness, dirt and 'other'. Continuing the theme of cultural reference points, could you say more about the use of analogies and of creating personalities behind each character?

PH: In the film, *Use Your Head to Stop the Spread*, three dangling grab handles are talking about humans walking down the stairs, whether one of them is wearing a mask or not. The research team with Joe tried different versions of that script and kept coming up against this thing that we didn't want to do, of being judgemental about mask wearing. It was around the time of the European Football Cup and the project lead, Emma Roe, suggested running with football as a frame for the film. The dialogue between the handles became a sports commentary on human behaviour – of whether the person was going to catch their sneeze; they spot someone with a mask and that's one point. It has this sense of a sporting analogy, but also reminds me of games you play with children, of spotting things outside the window, of counting red cars to keep a child quiet on a long journey.

CV: Developing appropriate and relatable characters was arguably more important when it came to breath and breathing as with the film *Fresh Air Shows You Care*.

PH: Scientific research was increasingly emphasising the importance of fresh air, which got us thinking; okay, how do we communicate about breath and keeping windows open? Central to our thinking about indoor spaces was needing to breathe and so this character became a calming yoga-teacher-type voice that was talking about breathing clean air in. It was a shift away from a didactic or alarmist tone: 'You must keep the windows open'. Our yoga teacher, with a lovely calming positive voice, was able to say that it's good to breathe and it's good to have fresh air.

CV: None of the team are scriptwriters, including Joe – who's in the field of cinematography – and my academic and artistic background is in dance. How did the process of writing work?

PH: The research team used a shared online document for the scripts and sometimes we worked offline and sometimes we collectively edited it 'live'. It was a useful lesson to try to boil down these complex ideas, during a dynamic time when guidance was evershifting and when rules differed geographically according to political borders, into something that was a real kernel, in an exchange that wasn't heavy-handed. It wasn't about being didactic, but it did have a sort of educational function.

Collaborating on the script felt like a useful process in pushing the team's conceptual and methodological thinking. How do we do more-than-human research and communicate interspecies relatedness through film? How can that process of scriptwriting enrich and enliven practices of engaging other publics whether through policy reports (Roe et al., 2021) or through stakeholder workshops? There was something valuable in being able to consolidate these ideas into exchanges of short, simple sentences and dialogues. Other than the statements at the end of each film, which were in the 'official' authorial voice of the researchers, the rest of the dialogue came through exchanges between the characters.

CV: There were multiple non-human voices that were manifesting or conjuring some of the issues that we were looking at. It's interesting how removing a word or a sentence transformed the flow and meaning of a particular socio-microbiological issue, practice or relationship.

PH: The team were thinking about spoken text, in different voices, and so intonation and how we structure those sentences were also something we had to learn about. The scripts were sent to voiceover artists under Joe's direction, and we found they interpreted the meaning of the words slightly differently. Some words were changed because of the voiceover artist's natural way of speaking. Everyone has a different rhythm or cadence. Our words didn't quite fit in their mouths. During writing sessions, the team read them out loud, which felt quite strange, but it was necessary to get to know that material in a very intimate way. And it drew us out of formal modes of writing for academic or report-reading audiences, and towards experimenting with more accessible and engaging materials for communicating interspecies relations.

CV: Scriptwriting opened up avenues for the research team to apply dramatic writing techniques (scene heading, structure, pause, rhythm, intonation, dialogues) to co-produce knowledge (with non-human bus characters and micro-pets) about public health and disseminate information in visually appealing and affectively generative ways. Such devices have critical and creative force to engage audiences on a different level (to public health and scientific

pedagogy) that is playful and imaginative, and which affirms the contingencies at play in the act of preventing infection.

#### **Conclusion: for more-than-human microbial methods?**