DIS-Covid

One of the chief features of the Covid-19 crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. This project will study the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the Covid-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. The editorial on the Covid-19 pandemic penned by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci and colleagues was appropriately titled “Navigating the Uncharted” (Fauci et al., 2020). This sense of “navigating the uncharted” is one of the chief features of the current crisis, and a multiplicity of voices in both the academic and the public arena echo a generalised feeling of disorientation. We suffer from political disorientation (e.g. the need for a radical shift in economic thinking; Michie, 2020), from social disorientation (e.g. the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures; Abel and McQueen, 2020), from spatial disorientation (e.g. the radical transformation of our sense of space during lockdown; Sood, 2020) and from temporal disorientation (e.g. the warping of our sense of time during lockdown; Cellini et al., 2020; Casati 2020; Perroy, 2020), to name but a few. It goes without saying that this feeling of disorientation has substantial effects on well-being and decision-making (Qiu et al., 2020; Roy et al., 2020; Rajkumar, 2020). The present project will consolidate the existing corpus and collect and analyse subjective reports of the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis in order to develop an integrative framework connecting spatial and non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, this framework will serve to build on the Disorientation Group existing expertise on spatial disorientation to further our understanding of the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Specifically, we have advanced a conceptualisation of spatial disorientation as a metacognitive affective state that regulates and evaluates navigation in physical space. The present project will permit us to extend this into a more general characterisation of (temporal, social, political…) disorientation as a metacognitive affective state that evaluates and regulates the subject’s navigation within non-physical spaces (e.g. social hierarchies, conceptual spaces, temporal schemas). This will give us a view of the relevant cognitive ecosystem and cognitive architecture needed to understand the phenomenon in detail, and to propose disorientation remediation strategies that help us chart and navigate the Covid-19 crisis.