Leisurement during the Period of COVID-19 Pandemic and Resurgent Authoritarianism

The session will focus on COVID-19 pandemic and a its local contours, the wide-ranging social effects that it has produced, the policy processes that have unfolded alongside it, and the political dynamics that presaged it in shaping the conceptions of leisure in society.

The session intends to address the role of necropolitics and necrosecurity, pointing to their relationships to colonial and eugenicist histories, as well as some of the ways in which a globally-ascendant authoritarian populism contributed to the often-disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic.

It will also highlight how unequal structures of social and public obligation were reproduced to the detriment of lives, leisure and livelihoods of the masses. Finally, it will consider some of the ways in which the pandemic may have opened up avenues for more systemic transformations.

Sub-themes:

1. Citizenship, and necropolitics during pandemic
2. Populism, health, and authoritarian politics in COVID-19
3. Leisure obligations, inequality and mortality in period of pandemic
4. Overlapping crises during pandemic & emergent futures beyond it
5. COVID-19 and challenges to the narratives of modernity
6. Divergent possibilities for Leisure in addressing future crises