Pandemic Perspectives - Part II - Students and Scholars Reflect on their Experiences of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Switzerland and Abroad

Abstract

What is it like to be on an ethnographic fieldwork trip in China when an epidemic breaks out? How are people with different levels of proficiency in German experiencing the COVID-19 outbreak in German-speaking Switzerland? What patterns of immobility and mobility emerge when your family is spread across two countries during a time of unprecedented travel restrictions? In this second part of the Pandemic Perspectives series, Amy Doricic, a Masters student in Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich, and Aline von Atzigen and Hatice Soeylemez, PhD candidates at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, share their unique experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though these reflections are centred on personal experiences, they each illuminate underlying structural inequalities in different ways. What each author illustrates is the importance of connection and communication between people, and perhaps with nature, in times of crisis.