Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic examines lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in communities and societies around the world before the arrival of vaccines. Read this blog post for a behind-the-scenes of this book, by editor Jack Fong.
Tell us about when the idea for Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic first came to fruition. Is there a story behind it? How did this topic get fleshed out?
The idea for the volume emerged during April 2020 when the state of California was experiencing its lockdown period, a particularly eerie experience that saw my city become emptied of social life. Combined with imagery and footage seen around the world during my daily intake of news imagery and footage, I felt compelled to no longer sit back and be a victim of this existential event. As such, I contacted my network of scholars, shared with them my idea to congregate thinkers to tackle this historical event, received input and suggestions for even more scholars for me to contact, and slowly compiled a list of writers for the undertaking. As the days blurred into the night, and existing out of conventional time during the lockdown period, I began emailing each contact with a polite message, noting an edited volume needed to be written about this traumatizing event not least for the purpose of having some semblance of control over our thoughts and thinking processes.
All those I contacted, save one, were very amenable and, much to my surprise, enthusiastic about the project. Not long after receiving their affirmations, I created a video greeting that I mass emailed to all our contributors. It should be noted that at this time, I had yet to receive a contract from a publishing house. In the mass email with the introductory video—one made by simply having my webcam record my speaking in my home office—I noted to our contributors the rudimentary timeline and my ongoing work with the proposal, one that ultimately saw me garner a contract with UTP during June 2020, thanks to acquisition editor Jodi Lewchuk who had the courage to see the timeliness of this endeavor despite it tackling a very difficult topic that yielded intense themes such as mortality, freedom (or lack thereof), human rights, social upheaval, crime, political polarization, and state control, to name but a few topics.
Are there any examples, anecdotes, or lessons that stood out to you during the research process of this book?
Throughout the four-year process of completing the volume, two interrelated contexts were able to churn out important insights during the process of compiling our authors’ chapters as well as completing my own—and both were informed by different geographies: one took place in Bangkok, Thailand (my geographical womb and second home)during my sabbatical in Fall season of 2021, while the other stemmed from my home in Los Angeles, California.
During Fall 2021, I returned to Bangkok to visit kin. At the time, Thailand was having its most acute encounter with the UK-variant of COVID. Interestingly, one year earlier in 2020, when much of the global north was experiencing the deleterious effects of the pandemic due to the non-existence of vaccines, Thailand and many countries in Southeast Asia fared “well”. State mitigation efforts worked wonders to stem the rates of infection. However, one year later, the entire country and the capital city of Bangkok was experiencing a social paroxysm that affected the global north a year earlier. The state of emergency was so severe that tourism dropped precipitously as the Thai government hurried to enforce a variety of quarantine measures for those arriving to Thailand. The policies shifted according to the health climate, and during my planned visit, the mandatory requirement was a 14-day quarantine period in a state-sponsored hotel.
Figure 1. Daily reporting of one’s health status.
Figure 2. Selfie at Victory Monument.
While visiting friends and family, I carefully watched my fellow Thais. Almost every Thai I saw—in all public environments I visited, as well as on public transportation—be it at a mall’s food courts, the city’s skytrain, its subway, or its buses—all donned masks. Not one person was publicly angry and transformed the act into a politicized issue. I witnessed with my own eyes the power of collectivism, where, if everyone did a little, everyone ended up contributing a great deal to the whole. What was compelling about such behavior is that Bangkok is in the tropics, a monsoonal environment of high heat mixed with high humidity where wearing a mask immediately meant that one’s exhalation created an undesirable odor inside the mask, one mixed with perspiration from the sweat accumulated from one’s head and face. Yet life and community continued. Public anger was nowhere to be seen, and everyone hunkered down to work for a better tomorrow no matter how unpleasant the present was.
Figure 3. ICONSIAM, one of the largest malls in Asia is virtually empty during the tourism downturn caused by the pandemic.
There was no violence between the unmasked or masked, no public outbursts of frustration, no caterwauling of whether COVID-19 was released as a “bioweapon” like the conspiracists in the United States would proclaim. Thais tried their best to go about their business and were convinced of better days to come—after all, what could be worse than the scenario that befell the capital city and the rest of the country. During evening hours, health officials provided live televised health updates on the pandemic, releasing figures about infection rates to keep the population informed. Perhaps one can attribute this tolerance and mindfulness to Buddhism. It is a religion, after all, that shuns aversions which are bona fide emotional responses (emotions need to be checked in Buddhism). Despite a dystopian Bangkok of closed shops, bankrupt business establishments, closed souvenir stalls, emptied malls, the city still persisted to ensure that operations for quotidian life was as organized as possible. Communal toxicity derived from politicization of the crisis, violence in the community, was nowhere to be seen in the city. Many citizens appeared to have their internal resources intact and trusted the state to do what was best for them. Ironically, I had one of my best visits back to the home country during the pandemic. Aside from the onerous procedural details that one had to attend to before arrival, during arrival, and during quarantine, there was a sense of clarity in the Thai people, and that clarity was that everyone had to work together to get through what fate had dealt them. There was a palpable, even visceral sense of a shared humanity and it was sublime to witness and experience. In Thailand, crisis brought out the best in people. My writing for the volume during this period was most productive and my interactions with community healthier and less angst-ridden than what could be had from California.
What was the most challenging aspect of editing this project?
The most challenging aspect about this project was my desire to uphold a community “vibe” with my contributing scholars, something that editors tend not to undertake. As many who have contributed chapters to an edited volume will know, one spends time on the chapter, submits it, the editor organizes the entirety of the project, sends back to each contributor revisions from reviewers, with reviewers submitting final versions for publication. The line of communication remains thin.
For me to buck the trend, I remained very transparent with my contributors, emailing them updates approximately every two months. Additionally, when too much needs to be communicated, I opted to send a voice message to them so that they can hear clearly the tone of my message, given that emails never capture tone. Whenever I received an update from UTP, I immediately mass emailed them about the update. None of our contributors, I believe, ever felt distanced from me, none were ever left “hanging”. Overall, there was a great deal of communication and interaction at a personal level. When it came to editing each chapter, I remained sensitive to exactly what they felt needed to be conveyed, the word choices that were employed (since a few of our contributors did not employ English as their first language); whatever photographs I felt would enhance their chapter, I sought their support and approval. One reviewer for a chapter was ambiguous in their suggestions, prompting confusion among the authors of the chapter, while, I personally also had to manage conflict that surfaced between a contributor and myself, a period of tension that was later resolved. Overall, the amount of mental gymnastics involved with eighteen writers was challenging, and none of the time management of the aforementioned dynamics included efforts at completing my personal chapter for the volume, as well as its hefty Introduction and Conclusion sections.
What do you hope readers will take away from reading Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic?
What I personally hope is that readers will appreciate that culturally-specific particularities—more specifically, the differences in crisis inequalities—affected our contributors’ experiences and analyses around the world as they observed their states trying to realize the social contracts they were required to uphold for their citizens. Caught within the many moving parts of public policies and community malformation in their home countries, some authors remained objective, placing their sentiments aside for the sake of conveying more issue-based analyses while others dared to express their indignations toward the myriad of crisis inequalities that surfaced. Another coterie opted to examine more cerebrally the act of knowledge production in liminal states of existence, and how our bodies are also epistemic sources of knowledge and sites of cultural and knowledge production, shaping our emotional states and humanitarian ethos. Upon reading each chapter, I hope readers can come away appreciating how our contributors’ disciplines offered us a glimpse into their disciplinary approaches toward reading reconfigured societies in ways that affect all of us.
Most importantly, I am of the view that with the privilege of hindsight, historians will one day view the COVID-19 pandemic in two distinct phases: the pre-vaccination phase when many social environments around the world were in a turbulent existential liminality, and the post-vaccination phase where the people finally had their “medicines” to find some semblance of a return to life and quotidian living. The readership, be it from scholar circles or from the general population, should not forget these two distinct phases, and especially how the former revealed the “insides” of our respective countries’ zeitgeists when our comfort zones, when our communities, when our loved ones, were affected by the pandemic.
Learn more about Reconfiguring Global Societies in the Pre-Vaccination Phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic by Jack Fong, here.
