Join us for a discussion and moment of reflection with Henriette Steiner, co-author of Time of Corona - Reflections on Love, Care, and Vulnerability in the Pandemic

In many respects, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be a thing of the past. Yet, what residual cultural practices, imaginations, social or economic inequalities or political divisions still linger on today? In this event, Henriette Steiner takes as a starting point Touch in the Time of Corona - Reflections on Love, Care, and Vulnerability in the Pandemic, a book “co-written apart” with Kristin Veel in the months following the first hard lock-down and published in 2021. The book looks at the particular ways in which the possibilities for touch, touching and being touched, both physically and affectively, were reconfigured by the pandemic: How did love, care, and humanity’s complex relationships with technology and nature play out in the interval between abandoned city centers and digitally mediated gatherings? And how did this allow us to imagine the world beyond the pandemic—both utopian and dystopian?

This event will engage the book’s exploration of the new forms of intimacy and distance that developed in the wake of COVID-19 and the forms of inequalities that arose during or were exacerbated after the onset of the pandemic, using the theoretical vocabularies from care ethics, ecofeminism, and affect theory. We will end the event with a collective exercise where we think about what residual forms of practices, social or political structures still linger on with us in our everyday lives, followed by a Q&A.