Speaker: Denise Milstein, Co-Director of the NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive at Columbia University; Ryan Hagen, Post-doctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University

Title:”Repertoires of repair: confronting ontological insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City”

How do people make sense of a world fundamentally unsettled by contagion? The pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2, along with restrictions on social interaction meant to control the virus, introduced radical uncertainty into the social and material environments of hundreds of millions of people around the world. The resulting crisis can be understood as a problem of what Anthony Giddens called ontological security — a confidence in the continuity of one’s self identity and ability to act in a predictable world. Analyzing 110 interviews conducted in New York City during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper examines the collapse and repair of ontological security among people living in a pandemic epicenter, using the social destabilization the crisis wrought as an opportunity to observe normally taken-for-granted processes of meaning-making, identity, and agency. Where Giddens saw ontological security as a mostly subconscious and emotional process, we show that it has deliberate agentic and epistemological components. Epistemological insecurity, provoked by the uncertainties of contagion, the disruption of social rhythms, and the radical novelty of the pandemic as an event, destabilizes relationships with people and the material world, identity, and temporality. These destabilizations restrict agency, keeping individuals in a state of crisis. We develop the concept of repertoires of repair to show how people deploy strategies for epistemological grounding and agentic enactment that allow them to break through the present crisis, reestablishing a sense of continuity and reliability.

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