TY - JOUR

T1 - Engaged Lingering

T2 - Urban Contingency in the pandemic present with Covid-19 in Denmark

AU - Bille, Mikkel

AU - Thelle, Mikkel

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - This article explores the intensification of contingency in an urban setting during the rapid spread of COVID-19 in Denmark. Based on interviews with fifty-one residents in the two largest cities in Denmark from the very first day of lockdown, it explores how the respondents expressed a friction between adapting to isolation, powerlessness and feelings of being out of time on the one hand, while simultaneously also being confronted with urgency through media and the immediacy of urban encounters on the other. Drawing on the works of François Hartog on presentism and Ben Anderson on terror preparedness, the central argument in this article is that with COVID-19 we see parallel negotiations of unknown futures near and far, in which urban contingency intensifies an already presentist sense of time. As one way of coping with the situation, people are actively lingering in a present without clear connections to past or future, fostering a form of stasis and hesitancy. In what we call an engaged lingering, urgency unfolds in seemingly contradictory ways to become simultaneously an everyday of frantic motion and paralysis.

AB - This article explores the intensification of contingency in an urban setting during the rapid spread of COVID-19 in Denmark. Based on interviews with fifty-one residents in the two largest cities in Denmark from the very first day of lockdown, it explores how the respondents expressed a friction between adapting to isolation, powerlessness and feelings of being out of time on the one hand, while simultaneously also being confronted with urgency through media and the immediacy of urban encounters on the other. Drawing on the works of François Hartog on presentism and Ben Anderson on terror preparedness, the central argument in this article is that with COVID-19 we see parallel negotiations of unknown futures near and far, in which urban contingency intensifies an already presentist sense of time. As one way of coping with the situation, people are actively lingering in a present without clear connections to past or future, fostering a form of stasis and hesitancy. In what we call an engaged lingering, urgency unfolds in seemingly contradictory ways to become simultaneously an everyday of frantic motion and paralysis.

U2 - 10.3167/saas.2022.300408

DO - 10.3167/saas.2022.300408

M3 - Journal article

VL - 30

SP - 110

EP - 125

JO - Social Anthropology

JF - Social Anthropology

SN - 0964-0282

IS - 4

ER -