The Covid-19 pandemic has upended lives, shifted views, and changed the way we live. However, throughout, we have grasped at a sense of normalcy. This theme was striking throughout Professor Laura Ashe’s programme, Plague Fiction. I’d like to explore this through the lens of documentation which Professor Ashe calls upon.
The example explored of administrative documentation through times of great difficulty as an act of humanity struck me. I, and I am sure many of us, have developed an almost subconscious habit of checking Covid-19 statistics daily. Every morning, in much the same way as I consume morning news along with my breakfast, I click through a graph charting the fall in cases. I seek out articles outlining the vaccination rollout. It seems that documentation does not solely exist as a way of memorialising fact, but as a way of building hope. This of course is a double edged sword. Over the early months of 2021, we watched cases rise exponentially. An insurmountable mountain of a graph appeared upon my screen every morning. Yet, in a strange way, this still brought with it hope. It is a basic law of physics that anything which goes up, must also come down. Watching this rise, I was instead heartened by the solidarity brought about through crisis. I watched my peers train to become vaccinators and volunteers, strangers gave way on park pathways, and masks were to be seen everywhere.
It feels somewhat as if this act of searching for information was embedded in the desire for normalcy. By building this into a routine which would exist regardless of a pandemic, a sense of control over the situation grows.
These thoughts which arose as I watched were complicated by my reading of Caduff’s “What Went Wrong”. In it, Caduff states “I have tried to carve a path through the morass of fear, panic, and desire for control to see how one can sustain a critical analysis of the pandemic response.” This implies that a desire for control is at odds with a critical analysis of pandemic response. This led me to reflect on the place of critical analysis versus the sense of humanity discussed in Professor Ashe’s programme. In the documentation of death counts, there seems to be rife opportunity for both critical analysis and a more human recognition of this desire for control, and thus normalcy.