My work on social and political responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is informed by my prior research on citizen-state relations during states of emergency (in Fiji) as well as my work on the politics of respiratory health (in New Zealand and central Europe).

I am in process of exploring various facets of life under lockdown. This includes consideration of how citizens are not merely passive recipients of lockdown measures but may take an active role in constituting states of emergency (see my article, "Rethinking States of Emergency” in Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale.) 

​

I have also written about how lockdown reveals the centrality of movement in our lives and the importance for anthropology in examining movement more broadly, and explored how affective communication changes during lockdown.

​

In collaboration with Sharyn Graham Davies, I have been thinking through the implications of NZ’s “bubble” policies, in particular the dangers of assuming that the members of a single residence compose a single household, and are most often members of the same family – for more details, see our article in The Spinoff, as well as our 2021 chapter in Covid-19: Global Pandemic, Societal Responses, Ideological Solutions (edited by M. Ryan).

​

Focusing more globally, I have explored how Czechs managed to engage in mandatory wearing of face masks when there weren’t enough face masks to go around and the meanings of citizens' involvements in "pandemic policing."

​