In a Viral Conjuncture: Locking Down Mobilities

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the various factors that must be taken into account to explain the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective on questions of how virtual and material geographies are enmeshed, paying particular attention to the continuing importance of transport infrastructures. The key concerns are with the politics of differential power over—and access to—mobility, in both its actual and virtual modalities. The COVID-19 crisis is argued to have functioned both as a mode of amplification of many preexisting forms of inequality and as a powerful solvent of the unexamined presumptions of the dominant discourse of globalization.