Resisting Pandemics: balconies, musicians and contemporary lockdowns in contemporary Spain

Abstract

[EN]If someone had asked us during the first days of confinement about our plans to cope with the crisis, we doubt that ‘writing a paper about musicians’ would had been our quick answer. We felt very distracted at first, unable to do research work, frantically checking out our body temperatures while explored the uncharted waters – at least for us – of online teaching. In all honesty, the task of trying to give sociological sense to mandatory social distancing dwarfed us, at least during the early stages – for us the lockdown effectively began on March the 12th; the Spanish Government formally declared a state of emergency on March the 14th. If only we had paid more attention to debates on moral panics or public health crises. We questioned our own skills and standing as sociologists. It was discomforting, and humbling, to realise that we, as academics, are not a vital profession.