On epidemiological consciousness and COVID-19: Envisioning vulnerability, hazard, and public health policy in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United Kingdom

This chapter examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has led to citizen-subjects in Aotearoa New Zealand and the UK developing particular modes of epidemiological consciousness: internalising and vernacularising the categories and logics of public health discourse to become self-regulating epidemiological thinkers, attuned to the ways that their relationships with others and with space might inhibit or facilitate viral transmission. In the process, they have developed distinct new forms of epidemiological sociality and cultivated modes of reasoning that could, in theory, be used to scrutinise policy choices and hold those in power to account. However, when it came to envisioning routes out of lockdown, research participants in both settings were inclined to consider their own nation's approach ‘safe’ and grounded in ‘science’ while viewing measures that had been successfully adopted in the other country as unsafe or impossible to enforce. Here, epidemiological consciousness was not protecting people so much as foreclosing forms of sociality that could support them during challenging times. Anthropological research can thus contribute to discussions about how to live through a pandemic by holding dominant modes of epidemiological consciousness to critical account while providing portraiture of viable alternative forms of pandemic life.