The quarantine window: Atmospheres and anguish at the COVID ‐19 borderlands
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· 2025
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/area.70058
· OA: W4414866185
In this paper we want to consider border atmospheres—what we understand as the material‐affective and emotional expressions of feeling in the dispersed borderlands of COVID quarantine spaces—through the quarantine hotel window. While the quarantine hotel is a seemingly more benign extension or expansion of the medico‐political border through COVID‐19 security controls and constraints, the quarantine hotel window became a symbol of the extension of the sealed borderzone into the wider archipelago of bordering legalities, spaces and infrastructures. Moreover, it became part of the lived experiences of those whose journeys during COVID were stalled and suspended by those practices. In this paper, we draw on the experiences of Chinese travellers returning to China who were interviewed in a research project on flying through COVID atmospheres in collaboration between scholars in China and the UK. We build on understandings of atmospheres to see how windows—as thresholds, surfaces and boundaries for atmospheres—may attenuate atmospheric movements, shaping their make‐up and their qualities. Atmosphere draws attention to the expressivity of life behind, reflected in, and mediated by the window in a mixture of partitioning and condensing, separating and gathering effects.
