Creative Resilience and COVID-19

Irene Gammel is Professor of Art, Literature, and Culture and Director of the Modern Literature and Culture (MLC) Research Centre at Ryerson University, Canada. Her research focuses on gender and modernity in literary and visual culture. She is author of I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of Lucy Maud Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) and Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity (MIT Press, 2002). She is also co-editor of Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (Book*hug, 2019), Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press, 2011) and Crystal Flowers: Poetry and a Libretto by Florine Stettheimer (Book*hug, 2010). She cohosts the MLC Pandemic Webinar Series, which explores the social, cultural, and creative dimensions of the COVID-19 crisis through arts, humanities, and social sciences research by a network of international scholars.Jason Wang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University, Canada. His research explores how modernist and contemporary literature and media encode power, politics, and social values. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "Urban Walking: Configuring the Modern City as Cultural and Spatial Practice," explored the aesthetics of spatial politics and the politics of spatial aesthetics in urban literature and culture from the early twentieth century to the post-industrial era. He has contributed chapters to Florine Stettheimer: New Directions in Multimodal Modernism (Book*hug, 2019) and Confluences 2: Essays on the New Canadian Literature (Mawenzi House, 2017) as well as the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. He also cohosts the MLC Pandemic Webinar Series.

• List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgments Introduction 1Irene Gammel and Jason WangPART ICrisis space and time1 The deadly air we breathe: how infectious illness built the modern cityMitchell Hammond2 “Why has the outbreak turned so deadly?”: diary from a quarantined cityIrene Gammel and Jason Wang3 Listening through a pandemic: silence, noisemaking, and musicDavid Cecchetto and Cameron MacDonald4 Netflix and chills: on digital distraction during the global lockdownDominic PettmanPART 2Vulnerability and resilience5 Killing swiftly: the effects of COVID-19 on the experience of the elderlyGeoffrey Scarre6 “He’s thinking about sex, I’m thinking about survival”: women’s sexual, domestic, and emotional labor during the COVID-19 pandemic Breanne Fahs7 “It’s like not a very Marshallese way of life”: marshallese cultural resilience during COVID-19Ramey Moore, Pearl A. McElfish, and Sheldon Riklon8 Sweden, COVID-19, and invisible immigrants 92Christian ChristensenPART 3Memory, visuality, and creativity 9 Threshold spaces: visualizing COVID-19 and the resilient power of the city Irene Gammel and Natalie Ilsley10 How drawing can help us see one another: from graphic medicine to diary comicsEmmy Waldman11 Going digital in a small city hub: community theater and dog performance events during lockdownKarin Beeler and Stan Beeler12 Becoming Host: zooming in on the pandemic horror filmSimon Turner and Stuart J. MurrayPART 4Adaptation, hope, and social change 13 Playing with the city: leisure, public health, and placemaking during COVID-19 and beyondTroy D. Glover14 Rethinking the spaces of night-time sociability Will Straw15 The end of Kino as we know it? Reflecting on the future of cinemas in Germany and beyondClaudia Kotte16 What COVID-19 has taught academics: historical arguments for the future of in-person teaching Kai BremerCoda by J. Michael RyanBibliographyIndex

'Irene Gammel and Jason Wang have put together an intellectual's guide to the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on our everyday lives. From labor struggles to "Netflix and chill," this edited volume explores how the pandemic rearranged everyday life, and it connects those changes to the medical, political, and social struggles that have defined this moment. Reading these essays, I remembered things from the pandemic that I had already forgotten, and I am glad to have this book as a way to keep that time with me.'Daniel Worden, Associate Professor of Art, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA'In this time of crisis, never had there been a better time to spotlight the cultures and practices of everyday life. The contributions to this wonderful book show in compelling and often heart-breaking ways just what it has been like to live with fear, grief and loss in pandemic conditions. But there is also an abundance of hope and meaning making emerging across these essays, captured in ways that invite the reader to enter into the worlds of people enduring these COVID times.'Deborah Lupton, SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia'Creative Resilience and COVID-19 offers a vital record of these times, tracing how, amid the vast scale of a global pandemic, the patterns and details of daily life profoundly change. The collection’s scope stretches across continents and cultural mediums and draws on a rich set of creative responses—from music, theatre, film, photography, diaries, graphic memoirs, and social media, to architecture, city planning, and public life and health. The essays illuminate the overt and subtle shifts the pandemic has brought to individuals and communities, asking central questions about survival, resilience, and recovery. An invaluable, timely volume for the COVID era.' Elizabeth Outka, Professor of English, University of Richmond. USA'A thoughtful and timely book on the unprecedented non-medical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the intersections of media and communication. This book raises important questions on the new veracities of life during the pandemic and helps us to understand present-day realities. The clarity of authors’ writings on various topics dealing with media and communication makes the book accessible to students, academics as well as anyone who would like to make sense of the impact of the pandemic on everyday life.'Valerie Visanich, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Malta, Malta