2020 Vision (2020)

IF THE PANDEMIC IS JUST THE START OF THINGS TO COME,
WHAT MIGHT WE LEARN FROM IT?
                                                                       
'2020 Vision' is an independent project looking back at a messy year. By musing on how the year might have sharpened our vision, this project aims to get 20/20 vision of 2020. However impossible that may be: We are embracing the mess.

How has 2020 sharpened your vision if at all? Please take part here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1I0HlM4yHt8xhSkyBLxWmj2Nb9MmiU4sfKLnHV5Ripeg/viewform?edit_requested=true

The intention is to publish the reflections/ musings as part of an independent print output.

2020 Vision - Making sense of a slippery year using mess as method. 

Contents

INTRODUCTION.

The Uncanny of 2020.

Mess as Method. 

The past as prologue/ 20/20 hindsight: 

The “Spanish” flu and Covid-19. 

Prohibition and Lockdown. 

The Jazz Age, the Roaring 20s and 2020. 

Epilogue/ 2020 Vision.

INTRODUCTION

It began with the need to make sense of the year 2020 as the first of the Covid years. For attempting to do so, we first thought it’s necessary to describe it and our experiences of it. 

However, how do we describe a year such as 2020? 

And is it possible at all to make sense of a year so unwilling to be tamed, so amorphous in its shape and so slippery in its perception of time?

Making sense of things is certainly something we are inclined to do, especially in the face of crises, to regain a sense of normality and – if only, the illusion of - control. In the Global North, this was historically done by making things unambiguous and clear, and, by putting them in an order. But can a year such as 2020/21 be put in order?

If this is an awful mess, 
then wouldn't something less messy make a mess of describing it? 

Following this suggestion by the sociologist, John Law, the present body of text takes the same slippery and amorphous form as the event it seeks to describe, untameable and fuzzy around the edges. It does so by way of assembling different ideas and approaches, loosely looking at past phenomena, like Influenza, Prohibition and the Roaring 20s, as a method for “knowing mess” (Law, 2006: 2), and, for proposing a framework; something to go by, for the future.

Sneak Peek into the first draft of the publication: