Pandemic Space: Understanding Quarantine and Responsibilization in Times of Corona

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Marian Burchardt; Dr. Nina Mackert; Dr. Caroline Meier zu Biesen; Professorin Dr. Maren Möhring
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458548712

As the current COVID-19 crisis powerfully shows, pandemics are inherently spatial phenomena that necessitate a re-ordering in how people and pathogens interact. Responses to the current pandemic focus on quarantine, at scales historically unprecedented, targeting not only specific groups (of infected or risky bodies) but entire populations. Quarantine, however, is more than simple forced immobility. Technologies of self-isolation, flexible confinement, social distancing, and the policing of compliance rely on activating individuals to coproduce their own and others’ health, or ‘responsibilizing’ citizens. While this concept is central in recent studies of public health, we lack insight into how responsibilization shapes how ordinary people construe and navigate bodily and public space in pandemic times.Our project investigates quarantining strategies and practices as central public health tools against pandemics and the processes of responsibilization that seek to make them effective. By illuminating the nexus of quarantine and responsibilization, the project will significantly contribute to the history and theory of disease prevention. Using an interdisciplinary approach involving historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thereby bringing together transregional and comparative perspectives, we will pursue three interrelated axes of analysis:(1) the circulation of quarantine knowledge in global public health discourses,(2) the history of quarantine during the Spanish Flu in the United States, and(3) current practices of quarantine in response to coronavirus in South Africa.While (1) takes a transregional perspective to reconstruct the history of increasingly shared knowledge and norms of disease control, and their (post)colonial legacies, the case studies in (2) and (3) focus on the implementation and negotiation of quarantine on the ground. Both in the US and South Africa, these efforts have been shaped by race, which plays a fundamental role in the social and spatial order of public health in both societies. We understand pandemic space and its construction via quarantine as conceived through expert knowledge, regulated by public health institutions enacted by ordinary citizens, and cutting across multiple scales in a context of worldwide viral spread. Our main research questions are: How have pandemic space and quarantining strategies been conceptualized and codified in international/global health discourses? Which social groups have been considered as responsible citizens, and what role has race played in this respect? What scientific observations and popular assumptions about personal space and sanitation have directed public health debates towards responsibilized behavior, and how have they been taken up by ordinary citizens?

• DFG Programme: Research Grants