key: cord-0050283-azn2h4lv
authors: O’Donovan, Órla
title: The Covid-19 catastrophe, authoritarianism, and refusing to get used to it
date: 2020-08-27
journal: Community Dev J
DOI: 10.1093/cdj/bsaa031
sha: 2ec8e725a331c93fd6fb4c23e0bfaf63352eff13
doc_id: 50283
cord_uid: azn2h4lv

nan

wearing facemasks in enclosed spaces, and expectations of a plannable future (even just the weeks ahead) have declined. Public health efforts to curb the spread of the feral virus are accelerating many trends already underway, including the digitization of life in forms such as telemedicine, remote working, and online teaching. To borrow a phrase from Mark Garavan, one of the new and very welcome members of the Editorial Board of the Community Development Journal (along with Sarah Banks and Anne O'Donnell), many of us are getting used to the 'geography of absence', as human material presence is being rendered a threat and supplanted by hygienic and managed cyberspaces.

The temporalities of the intimately connected catastrophes of the pandemic and climate destruction are different, one fast and one slow, but it is worrying how easy it is to become used to and resigned to them both. While Anna Tsing (2015) has extolled 'the arts of noticing' and asked us to pay attention to what survives in the climate destructed capitalist ruins, the coronavirus catastrophe has forced us to notice aspects of the 'new normal' that are not new, but are what usually happens. In the words of Arundhati Roy (2020), the lockdown 'worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things', or things we are used to or that go unnoticed. India, she says 'revealed herself in all her shame -her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering. . . . as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their workingclass citizens -their migrant workers -like so much unwanted accrual'. In the United States, the lethal consequences of the ongoing history of colonial capitalist extraction have been illuminated as the most extreme scene of destruction from the pandemic is amongst the Navajo nation (Haraway 2020). Throughout the world, what Marcelo Lopes de Souza (2020) describes as 'sacrifice zones', segregated spaces for people whose lives do not matter, have been revealed, including many so-called care facilities for older people.

In Sue Kenny's invited Reflections piece 'Covid-19 and community development' published in this issue of the Community Development Journal, she lists a number of urgent political actions that can be taken right now, actions that can be regarded as part of a politics of refusal to get used to it. First amongst these is to 'join the chorus of those alerting the world to the threats and dangers of authoritarianism'. The pandemic is occurring during a right wing turn and conservative revolution globally, together with a rise of authoritarianism, now taking place opportunistically in many instances under the guise of controlling the Covid-19 pandemic. She points to 'the ways in which authoritarian populists such as Orban in Hungary and Bolsonaro in Brazil have used the pandemic as a cover to extend Editorial 3 their powers, by eliminating dissent and extending state surveillance'. Authoritarianism curtails the democratizing impulses and potentials of civil society and community development, and it is crucial that we complain about it. Sue includes an important caveat to this political action of exposing and opposing the rise of authoritarianism, stressing that this need to be done in ways that avoid 'validating the views of radical libertarians who reject all state interventions'. This necessitates reimagining not only what states might do, but also what they are, as encouraged by Davina Cooper's (2019) book Feeling Like a State. Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority. It also requires a capacity to be in the thick of the many contradictions that can arise in opposing authoritarianism and supporting public health interventions. As I write this in August 2020, in Australia, where Sue lives, further rules and restrictions have been introduced amid the worsening of the outbreak and growing concerns about discretionary police powers to enforce the rules. Peter Westoby and Verne Harris' article 'Community development "yet-tocome" during and post the COVID-19 pandemic: from Derrida to Zuboff', also focused on the Covid-19 catastrophe and included in this issue of the journal, considers a number of concepts that are helpful to this reimagination and thinking through these contradictions. Conversing on concepts offered by the theorists Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire, Shoshana Zuboff, Arturo Escobar, and Franco Bifo Berardi, they endeavour to imagine a 'soulful community development yet-to-come'.

Another urgent political action outlined by Sue Kenny that can draw on experiences of involvement in community development is that 'we can point to the thousands of small scale initiatives that pre-figure very different ways of organising society'. These experiences, she suggests, could form the basis of a 'kit-bag of exemplars that demonstrate the value of how to organise using such principles as social and ecological justice, collaboration and deliberative democracy'. Combining this kit-bag with the conceptual toolkit considered by Peter Westoby and Verne Harris could well form the basis of a Community Development Complainers' Handbook, to borrow from the one of the two possible book titles being considered by Sara Ahmed for her study of complaints, the other being The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. This would be a community development handbook for refusing to get used to it.

What's the Use? On the Uses of Use

Feeling Like a State. Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority

Interview as Part of the Exhibition and Conference Critical Zones -Observatories for Earthly Politics

Sacrifice zone'. The environment-territory-place of disposable lives

The pandemic is a portal

The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins