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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Becoming a neighbourhood : experiencing COVID-19 in New Westminster O'Hern, Cailin Douglass

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic made a profound impact on global communities, while the relatively soft restrictions on mobility during “lockdown” in British Columbia facilitated an experience which differed from those of citizens located elsewhere in Canada. Changing modalities for work and school enabled busier people to accomplish more with the time they had available, facilitating a network of volunteers in New Westminster to develop a grassroots response to the crisis which was sustained through the peak of public health restrictions on movement. Collaboration between the municipal government and citizens suggest that preparedness planning could benefit from considering junctions of power within local communities, to ensure marginalized communities and individuals are supported during crises. While volunteers eagerly supported their neighbours through the pandemic, the whole community could not be supported through their response. Extant technologies limit the capacities for a grassroots response even as social media enables real-time communication. This thesis presents a public narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic, co-produced by the author and seven key informants, derived from physically distanced interviews conducted through video conferencing software. The recorded interviews discuss everyday life through the onset of the pandemic, a dynamic crisis with no clear end-point, in 2020 and into 2021. Through metaphors relating to war and movement, ideas about normality centre mobility as a goal-post around which an adaptive response to the pandemic developed. As British Columbia shifted into a phased reopening plan, individuals were left to navigate the boundaries of social interaction and establish mutual understandings of comfort between family, friends, and neighbours. Social media facilitated a grassroots response, but algorithms developed in profit-driven environments continue to incentivize harmful or anti-social behaviour to proliferate in online communities.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International