CoronaCare: An ethnographic study of the risks to and potential for social health during the Corona Virus Pandemic

Project Overview

CoronaCare empirically explores how the socio-political measures to contain the virus’ spread affect social health, a form of health which unfolds through and across social relations. It explores how caring as a fundamental human activity and integral to sustaining social health is impacted when in-person and person-to-person contacts are restricted and everyone is radically redefined as at risk from others and a risk to others. Its ethnographic research design maps how these regulations alter our ability to care and be cared and documents, explains and evaluates how social health is maintained in these exceptional circumstances. This citizen-science fueled ethnography uses a variety of methods namely telephonic and video interviews with 60-70 research participants, the collection of ethnographic material including video and audio diaries, storyboards, first-person camera footage, photographs and a survey based on the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ). Taken collectively, these methods enable precisely the sharp resolutions for richly describing and understanding how people are experiencing the social regulations and how the regulations are (re)shaping our ability to be cared for and to care for one another.