ABSTRACT

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic.

The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema.

The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

chapter |13 pages

Introduction

ByIrene Gammel, Jason Wang

part 1|43 pages

Crisis space and time

chapter 1|10 pages

The deadly air we breathe

How infectious illness built the modern city
ByMitchell Hammond

chapter 2|12 pages

“Why has the outbreak turned so deadly?”

Diary from a quarantined city
ByIrene Gammel, Jason Wang

chapter 3|9 pages

Listening through a pandemic

Silence, noisemaking, and music
ByDavid Cecchetto, Cameron MacDonald

chapter 4|10 pages

Netflix and chills

On digital distraction during the global lockdown
ByDominic Pettman

part 2|44 pages

Vulnerability and resilience

chapter 5|9 pages

Killing swiftly

The effects of COVID-19 on the experience of the elderly
ByGeoffrey Scarre

chapter 6|12 pages

“He's thinking about sex, I'm thinking about survival”

Women's sexual, domestic, and emotional labor during the COVID-19 pandemic
ByBreanne Fahs

chapter 7|10 pages

“It's like not a very Marshallese way of life”

Marshallese cultural resilience during COVID-19
ByRamey Moore, Pearl A. McElfish, Sheldon Riklon

chapter 8|11 pages

Sweden, COVID-19, and invisible immigrants

ByChristian Christensen

part 3|52 pages

Memory, visuality, and creativity

chapter 9|16 pages

Threshold spaces

Visualizing COVID-19 and the resilient power of the city
ByIrene Gammel, Natalie Ilsley

chapter 10|14 pages

How drawing can help us see one another

From graphic medicine to diary comics
ByEmmy Waldman

chapter 11|10 pages

Going digital in a small city hub

Community theater and dog performance events during lockdown
ByKarin Beeler, Stan Beeler

chapter 12|10 pages

Becoming Host

Zooming in on the pandemic horror film
BySimon Turner, Stuart J. Murray

part 4|46 pages

Adaptation, hope, and social change

chapter 13|9 pages

Playing with the city

Leisure, public health, and placemaking during COVID-19 and beyond
ByTroy D. Glover

chapter 14|9 pages

Rethinking the spaces of night-time sociability

ByWill Straw

chapter 15|10 pages

The end of Kino as we know it?

Reflecting on the future of cinemas in Germany and beyond
ByClaudia Kotte

chapter 16|10 pages

What COVID-19 has taught academics

Historical arguments for the future of in-person teaching
ByKai Bremer

chapter |6 pages

Coda

Global consciousness of COVID-19: where can we go from here?
ByJ. Michael Ryan