'Stay Home, Stay Safe': Proximity as Vitality and Vulnerability Under Lockdown

From March to May 2020 in the UK, measures that became known across world as ‘lockdown’ curtailed personal freedoms order curb spread of SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus. While initial criticisms lockdown focused on adverse impacts social isolation wellbeing, this research article explores how creates new and altered proximities intimacies well distances. During UK lockdown, ‘household’ ‘home’ were deployed public rhetoric default spaces care security face widespread uncertainty. However, emergent created by bringing people together assumed safety home also deepened existing inequalities vulnerabilities. Using anthropological theory, third sector evidence, ethnographic interview data we explore process. We argue understanding proximity intimacy fundamentally ambivalent, not normatively affirming, is central recognising pandemic responses such reinforce reproduce forms inequality violence.