Edge Effects: The COVID-19 Pandemic and the National Borders of the Imagination

A year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, scientists and medical practitioners have a clearer picture of the virus. Yet one the biggest challenges that this crisis has posed for many of us is, no doubt, the difficulty of making sense of it. From the unclear origin of the virus to the variety of symptoms it presents to its “invisibility,” COVID-19 has kept a majority of us in the dark.

A bold new critique of dialogue as a method of eliminating dissentA year after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, scientists and medical practitioners have a clearer picture of the virus. Yet one the biggest challenges that this crisis has posed for many of us is, no doubt, the difficulty of making sense of it. From the unclear origin of the virus to the variety of symptoms it presents to its “invisibility,” COVID-19 has kept a majority of us in the dark.

To understand how a pandemic affects a global community, as Benedict Anderson might have said, many of us have had to imagine that community in the first place. This is not to say, of course, that one must believe in a lie or in something that is patently false. Instead, direct contact and first-hand experience can be replaced by interactions with images that we entrust with meaning and veracity, in the same way no one person knows all fellow country people and yet has the imaginative mechanisms to recognize their existence.

Article at Edge Effects.

Published in: Edge Effects
By: Juan Meneses