Becomings and Unbecomings: COVID-19 and New Narrative Trajectories

Unfolding the fears and uncertainties amidst “a debilitating infodemic caused by our inability to make sense of the COVID-19 story”, Sumithra Prasanna in “COVID-19 and the Collapse of the Narrative” observes, “The COVID phenomenon is devoid of ‘linear narrativity’, the typical story pattern that builds up to a cathartic denouement, because everything we thought we knew of life is upended by the most devastating black swan of this century” (2020, n.p.). Taking cue from Sumithra Prasanna’s idea of ‘narrative collapse’, this special issue engages with the ways in which covid-inspired narratives constructed by academics, media, institutions, governments, film makers and other cultural organisations make sense of contemporary reality, and in so doing, intersect with the production of knowledge in the period when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” ( Fraser, 2019). Given pandemic’s reverberating impacts on different facets of society – from restriction of mobility such as, social distancing, lock down, quarantine, and closure of borders around the world to its impact on social, economic, educational and cultural domains – it is imperative to consider the way an individual or collective experience of crisis inspires new directions in policy making, behaviour, theory, philosophy and imagining new potentialities of art and literature. We therefore invite scholars, students, artists and theorists from all disciplines to submit papers that reflect on the

● Impact of pandemic on marginalised groups
● Questions of border and boundaries during pandemic
● Narratives of ‘new normal’
● Education and learning during pandemic
● Business, consumerism and Covid-19
● Pandemic and digital Surveillance
● Work spaces in the times of pandemic
● Media and pandemic
● Communications in the times of Covid-19
● Activism and Covid -19
● Leadership and responsibility during pandemic
● Mobility in the times of Covid.
● Covid-19 and the Entropocene
● The viral and the memetic as narrative practices
● Representations of lockdowns
● Pandemics and infodemics
● Embodied inscriptions of stigma and trauma
● Contagions and the non-human
● Speculating Post-COVID scenarios in postcolonial societies

Deadline for full paper submissions is 30 November 2021. The special issue is scheduled for Issue
1 and 2, 2021.
Submissions should be made through the JCP OJS online submission site
http://irigs.iiu.edu.pk:64447/ojs/index.php/jcp/information/authors
Manuscripts should strictly adhere to the JCP submission guidelines. These guidelines are available on the journal’s website. Questions and comments about the special issue should be addressed to jcp@iiu.edu.pk.