| Title: |
The quarantine window: Atmospheres and anguish at the COVID‐19 borderlands. |
| Authors: |
Li, Mohan; Weng, Lisheng; Adey, Peter |
| Source: |
Area (0004-0894); Mar2026, Vol. 58 Issue 1, p1-8, 8p |
| Subject Terms: |
Quarantine; Border crossing; Solitude; Emotions; Chinese people; Ambience (Environment); COVID-19 pandemic |
| Geographic Terms: |
China |
| Abstract: |
In this paper we want to consider border atmospheres—what we understand as the material‐affective and emotional expressions of feeling in the dispersed borderlands of COVID quarantine spaces—through the quarantine hotel window. While the quarantine hotel is a seemingly more benign extension or expansion of the medico‐political border through COVID‐19 security controls and constraints, the quarantine hotel window became a symbol of the extension of the sealed borderzone into the wider archipelago of bordering legalities, spaces and infrastructures. Moreover, it became part of the lived experiences of those whose journeys during COVID were stalled and suspended by those practices. In this paper, we draw on the experiences of Chinese travellers returning to China who were interviewed in a research project on flying through COVID atmospheres in collaboration between scholars in China and the UK. We build on understandings of atmospheres to see how windows—as thresholds, surfaces and boundaries for atmospheres—may attenuate atmospheric movements, shaping their make‐up and their qualities. Atmosphere draws attention to the expressivity of life behind, reflected in, and mediated by the window in a mixture of partitioning and condensing, separating and gathering effects. In this paper, we consider border atmospheres—what we understand as the material‐affective and emotional expressions of feeling in the dispersed borderlands of COVID quarantine spaces—through the quarantine hotel window. We draw on the experiences of Chinese travellers returning to China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
| : |
Copyright of Area (0004-0894) is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.) |
| Database: |
Complementary Index |