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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Charlotte Veal
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This paper will examine experiences of bus passengers during the COVID-19 pandemic, tracing the intimate bodily encounters, everyday anxieties, and practical negotiations of those travelling onboard buses with unknown human and nonhuman (microbial) others. It draws on ethnographic observations on buses and semi-structured interviews with bus users, cleaners, and drivers from multilingual communities in Bristol and Southampton, in 2021. I explore the changing affordances (between passengers, bus architecture, microbial worlds) in the performance of infection prevention habits, unwritten passenger codes of conduct, and material bodily cultures formed in response to shifting perceived risk and anxieties of the virus and governmental public health guidance. The paper is interested in the microbial imaginaries that emerged and gained currency, as people were learning to share the world with nonhuman agents (Sars-CoV-2) within a ‘microbial landscape’ that they could neither see nor scientifically understand. I consider what it was like to be a passenger during the crisis and the ordinary, everyday negotiations enacted. I draw on Berlant’s ‘theories of attachment’ (2011) to address the complex feelings generated in and around the bus travelling space. These feelings include aversion, ambivalence and care that shaped whether to, or when to travel, and responses to strategies implemented by bus operators or bus users to maximise safety (seat occupation, mask wearing, hand hygiene, ventilation). I conclude with a call for critical consideration of the everyday experiences of public health and infection prevention within public transport spaces, and for the differentiated experiences of risk in relation to Sars-CoV-2 and future health challenges.
Author(s): Veal C
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Putspace: Public Transport as Public Space in European Cities: Narrating, Experiencing, Contesting
Year of Conference: 2022
Online publication date: 25/04/2022
Acceptance date: 22/12/2021
Publisher: HERA
URL: https://putspace.eu/brussels-2022/
