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TRANSFORMATIONAL SLOWNESS

Lori Brown // Syracuse

What does it mean to slow down in the 21st century?

What I find myself continually thinking about is slowness: the slowness of daily life—the repetition of days that bleed into weeks, what has become the ritual of walking, of preparing and cooking meals, the now daily challenge of concentration and work. Our lives revolve around taking care of the most basic human needs right now. In many ways it is unbelievable how so much of our existence has been drastically transformed from mid-March. What does it mean to slow down in the twenty-first century? To become more cognizant of the excesses of a highly performative academic and activist life? I am grappling with the privilege of this slowness and what this pandemic is also allowing me—an opportunity, even a mandate—to literally stop how I was living and to contemplate what I hope to contribute once we are on the other side of Covid-19. Notice, I use the future tense because I remain optimistic.

As I am now only at home like much of the world, my mind continues to return to intersections between routines of daily life and a current research project I am working on about the border. The project explores United States immigration policies, NAFTA and free trade zones producing massive patterns of migration, migrants seeking asylum, and the myriad spaces of care for those women and children, unaccompanied minors, men, and families seeking a better life. The history of American immigration is fraught with legalized exclusions. The border is open for preferred immigrants when it economically benefits certain sectors of the country and closed to everyone else. Yet there are those who create spaces of support for the thousands who have migrated. This project collides against what has become ever more evident: the degrees in which the pandemic accelerates and exacerbates these economic and political inequities at such massive scales. In a strange way, these current extremes mirror what our policies have been doing since the country’s founding. Inflicting even further pain upon those seeking to enter the United States, on April 20 Trump tweeted that he “will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!” as a way to “pause” immigration in order to protect American jobs. This sixty-day order was signed on April 22.

Huge facets of the global neoliberal economy have come to a screeching halt on almost all fronts except for the most basic essentials and their supply chains. We see this through our empty grocery store shelves, the run on disinfectant products, toilet paper, and, of all things, even baking supplies. What this moment brings to the foreground are the ways to live in the world that recognize, as philosopher Maria Puig del la Bellacasa posits, “the inevitable interdependency essential to the existence of reliant and vulnerable beings” [1] and how new ways of being may emerge post-pandemic, changing the direction of what is possible for the future of the planet. Recall how poorly most countries are adhering to carbon reductions as per the Paris Climate agreement. Such enormous behavioral change just ten weeks ago did not seem remotely possible. 

For many of the population, our now hyper-separated lives are enforced through social distancing and sheltering-at-home. With bans on so many aspects of living we previously took for granted, these changes in daily activities have produced a jaw dropping infinitely smaller carbon and waste footprint. However, scientists predict that this five percent overall reduction, the largest annual decrease on record, will not be enough to prevent a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures over the next decade. [2] And yet, Covid-19 has produced immediate evidence that the world can take drastic steps and radically change behavior when survival is at stake. This renders mute arguments that the world cannot take such extreme steps to address the climate crisis because as we are quarantined around the world, our sheltering behaviors are dramatically altering everything. Building upon what feminist economic geographers J.K. Gibson-Graham ask, how can we be motivated by “an ethic of caring for place and environment” that no longer separates humans and non-humans? [3] Because to continue to do so limits the capability to respond to ongoing environmental disaster and ruin. The pandemic illustrates this so clearly—the virus observes no borders, no primacy of species, no economic or social differences. To survive, humanity must work collectively. We see this, for example, in how researchers are expeditiously collaborating across nation-state borders to create a vaccine as quickly as possible.

This slowness I find myself cocooned within is an entrance into a feminist ethics of care. As del la Bellacasa highlights, this relational way of being and thinking-with is one where all participate in world making. Within this framework, new connections and by extension new communities can come into existence rather than maintain the existing state of affairs. [4] Not only providing me, my family, friends, and students a different way of being in the world, this moment also suggests a different way forward, a different future. What is the bare minimum we need now to survive within this current pandemic and how can this inform our actions later? My hope is that during this time of slowness we presently inhabit, within the quarantined-being-in-the-world selves we maintain in order to reduce the virus’s spread and protect others, this relational existence provides a way to more fully recognize our inherent inter-dependency and co-existence. This inter-dependency must become central to what actions will follow.

Notes:

  1. María Puig del la Bellacasa, “Thinking with care,” Matters of Care Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 70.

  2. Benjamin Storrow, “ Why CO2 Isn’t Falling More during a Global Lockdown,” Scientific American, E&E News, April 24, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-co2-isnt-falling-more-during-a-global-lockdown/. 

  3. J.K. Gibson-Graham, “A feminist project of belonging for the Anthropocene,” Gender, Place & Culture 18, no. 01 (2011): 2, 5.

  4. del la Bellacasa, “Thinking with care,” 78–79.

Author Bio:

Lori Brown’s creative research practice examines relationships between architecture and social justice and seeks to create political engagement. She is co-founder and leads ArchiteXX, a NYC women and architecture group bridging the academy and practice and is a professor at Syracuse University School of Architecture.