N.F. (Nicolas) Gäckle, MA

Research interests

Imaginaries of pandemic life seem to mark a triumph of the biological in the midst of emergency. Their surfaces are the curved realities of dashboards, the colour-coded differentiations of ‘risk’ areas (quite regularly congruent with the borders of nation-states), the behavioural norms developed and continuously updated, depending on the gradual clearing of the fog of pandemic science and its highly dynamic “ground-zero empiricism” (Daston 2021). Observing the societal and governmental problematisation of how the pandemic makes people feel, the recognition of essential emotional and affective needs of humans, the articulation of the requirement to assess public perceptions as well as the emergence of new semantic fields and metaphors that seek to describe collective pandemic atmospheres my thesis explores “pandemic exposures” (Fassin and Fourcade 2021) that reach beyond the biological and into the experiential. Engaging with these developments as a recalibration of the object of biopolitics – life – it asks for how we can understand the emergence of pandemic experience as a problem of governance during the COVID-19 pandemic.