ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the implications of research conducted in the midst of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that monitored how responses to the virus by government agents and authorities engaged with the regulation of everyday habits. The research also explored how such interventions into daily habits were registered in the media, social media, public commentary and across a range of academic disciplines. Our discussion here focuses on three themes: managing the behaviour of crowds in view of the risks of ‘habits of contagion’ in urban contexts; the new infrastructures and atmospheres associated with requirements of social distancing, and reconfigurations of the spatial dynamics and articulations of habits, especially those within the home. In discussing these, the chapter also takes account of the different ways in which Foucault’s distinction between the systems developed for the management of leprosy and the plague, as well as his subsequent discussion of the biopolitical forms of government that were later developed for the management of smallpox, informed the governance of habits in response to COVID-19.
