Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel
Risk and socio-spatialities in Australians' accounts of border controls during the Covid-19 pandemic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3977824 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ella Butler (UNSW Sydney), D Lupton (0000-0003-2658-4430, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 833-851 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14649365.2023.2240290 |
| OpenAlex | W4385305767 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 36 |
During the COVID-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions have exerted controls over people’s mobilities as a way of containing viral spread. In Australia, international borders were closed for almost two years and internal borders were periodically shut and policed as part of strong public health measures implemented by federal and state governments. In this article, we discuss how Australians conceptualized risk in relation to border controls, drawing on a set of interviews conducted in 2021 in which participants were asked to recount their experiences of the pandemic. Our analysis builds on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants’ accounts of living in COVID times, in which they were confined within both national and internal borders. Our findings suggest three main socio-spatial imaginaries at work in participants’ accounts of life behind closed borders during COVID-19. The first imaginary is an idea of immunity as a spatial property, supporting the concept of geographic immunity. The second is an ambivalent distinction between Self and Other produced through borders hastily thrown up along state lines. The third is the experience behind closed borders of living in a state of ‘suspension’, whereby risk is provisionally held off spatially, yet projected into the future
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Disease · Pandemic · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · History · Medicine · Migration, Health and Trauma · Migration, Refugees, and Integration · Internal Medicine
Flexible Bodies
Purity and Danger
Toward good practice in thematic analysis
The Covid digital home assemblage
Infrastructures of Care for Public Housing Residents During Covid-19 Detention
Risk and Culture
A cross-sectional investigation of the mental health and wellbeing among individuals who have been negatively impacted by the Covid-19 international border closure in Australia
Public Health Management of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Australia
Feeling in Suspension
The Limits of the City
Pandemic fitness assemblages
A Body Worth Defending
Being mobile in an era of lockdown
Transmission and territory
Pathological (Im)mobilities
Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the Covid-19 crisis
Unhealthy geopolitics? Bordering disease in the time of coronavirus
Places of belonging, loneliness and lockdown
Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation
We may be long in the tooth, but it makes us tough
Migrating borders, bordering lives
Sharing and caring
Border food and food on the border
The Pandemic Imaginerie
Condition-Suspension
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |