The Connections Between Governance of Human Movement and Governance of Breathing Air During the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the act of breathing air became a central policy focus, tied to people’s ability to move. From wearing mandatory masks to navigating public spaces, the governance of breathing air became an essential part of the management of mobility. What will remain after COVID-19 from this increased societal concern with air?

Think of the campaigns for improved indoor air quality through ventilation, filtration and disinfection; and remember the myriad access-control and social-distancing measures that created a patchwork of more or less hermetically enclosed and internally redesigned bubbles of individual and/or shared breathing through which and in which movement was allowed to happen. If we want to understand the logics and legacies of the fight against COVID-19, the imbrications between the governance of the air and the governance of human movement must be placed center stage.

My aerial sensitivity adds a volumetric dimension to existing studies of the ways in which the fight against COVID-19 was related to the management of human movement. More specifically, I foreground the ways in which the aerial realm became an object and perspective of public health policy in Switzerland in the years 2020-2022. This discussion is structured into two main parts, which subsequently discuss how the aerial realm was approached (1) in its situated and embodied gaseous aspects, and (2) in its affective, socio-technical, and power-related dimensions.

The Elemental, Situated and Embodied Dimensions of Air

Policy discourses and measures in the fight against COVID-19 made constant reference to air as a gaseous reality, the elementality of which became relevant in novel ways (fresh air, renewed air, clean and moving air, contagious and dangerous air, etc.). This led to the problematization of air’s atmospheric infill as a voluminous reality in which social action and movement unfolds. Yet importantly, air’s elementality not only moved center stage as a context of social action and as an object of policy concern (Williams, 2011), but also as an “active conveyor of things” (Adey, 2014), referring to air’s role in the virus’ transmission via droplets and aerosols. The air was understood as both a context and a mediator of social action, and as simultaneously cognitive, practical, and embodied reality. Remember the policy recommendations with regard to how best to cough (into the arm and by turning away, etc.) and the media-reported incidents of attacks by coughing or spitting. Instilling the population with a sense of bodily and sensory immersion within the air’s field of virus transmission, health policy during the COVID-years was all about the air-related body, in its very corporeality and positionality.

In many ways, this concern with air was bound up with the organization of the socio-spatial reality on the ground. Manifold efforts were made to redesign spaces of internal flows or transit such as airports, railway stations, shopping malls, schools and universities, through corridors, ground markings for queuing areas, as well as new entry and exit paths. The air was approached as a situated volume, and as such inscribed within a wider effort towards a substantially redesigned and highly controlled environment of moving, yet disciplined breathing bodies.

Channeling flows in the fight against COVID-19 at the University of Neuchâtel (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences). Photo: Francisco Klauser.

The Emotional, Socio-Technical and Power Dimensions of Air

This situatedness of air was also expressed in regulatory terms (e.g. through legally imposed rules on where to go and how to behave in particular places) and related to the implementation of a wide range of additional technical and social measures of control. A complex “socio-technical assemblage” of the air emerged (Latour, 1993), which in turn gave rise to novel knowledge practices, ranging from expert opinions to risk calculations and technical forms of expertise. Consequently, a novel regime of aerial governmentality developed, composed of myriad interacting actors, interests, and sources of authority.

In this process, the aerial realm was invested with affective values (such as fear or hope), individual and collective imaginaries (such as risk), practical considerations, and strategic, interest-driven choices. Thus, the air not only became relevant for political action and concern, but was also fought over as a space in which and through which all kinds of other interests were being conveyed (such as interests of a commercial nature). This in turn produced novel ways of ordering the air through legally, practically, and materially defined geometries, internal structures, and contours. These geometries of the air were lived, experienced, and socio-politically produced in highly unequal ways. Differing ways of accessing and using the air required differing tools, skills, and legal authorizations. For example, only restaurants with a certain size and technical equipment were allowed to stay open. Only some categories of people were allowed to access specific places, etc. The geometries of the air remained inherently pluralistic, and as such fundamentally secessionary and conflictual.

The Aerial Legacy of COVID-19

The pandemic thus increased the air’s relevance as an everyday reality that has corporeal volume, shape, and agency. It is experienced as an immersive environment, and lived as a situated, delimited, and internally structured reality, invested with affective and cognitive meaning, objectified and instrumentalized through specific intentions and practices, related to bodily positioning and sensory experiences, and ultimately invested by all kinds of power relations.

There is reason to assume that this increased explicitness of air as a health-relevant reality, which intersects with the governance of human movement in manyfold ways, will be one of the legacies of the fight against COVID-19. Today, there are all kinds of air-related debates, ranging from the standardization of air-filtration units in schools to air-quality issues in private offices and trains. To gain a better understanding of these ‘aerial lessons’ from the pandemic, I suggest using the various dimensions of air outlined above as one possible heuristic tool.

Francisco Klauser is a Professor of Political Geography at the University of Neuchâtel and well as a Project Leader of the nccr – on the move’s project Towards a Novel Mobility Regime? The Legacies of the COVID-19 Pandemic Regarding the Governance of Human Movement. His work invites a critical engagement with the air, as a geopolitical space in, on, and through which power is being exercised in manifold ways.

This blog post is part of our series „Towards a Novel Mobility Regime.“

References:

-Adey P (2014) Air. London: Reaktion Books.
-Latour B (1993 [1991]) We Have Never Been Modern: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-Williams A J (2011) Reconceptualising spaces of the air: Performing the multiple spatialities of UK military airspaces. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36(2): 253–267.