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COVID‐19 is a multi‐spectral crisis that has added an acute layer over a panoply of complex emergencies across the world. In the process, it has not only exposed actually‐existing emergencies, but also exacerbated them as the global gaze has turned inward. As a crisis, COVID‐19 straddles and challenges the boundaries between humanitarianism, development, and global health—the frames and categories through which emergencies are so often understood and intervened upon. Reflection on these fundamental categories is, we argue, an important geographical endeavour. Drawing on Geoffrey Bowker's analytical lens of the 'infrastructural inversion', we explore how humanitarianism has been upended by COVID‐19 along two axes that are of core concern to geographers: (1) the spatial and (2) the temporal. We first contextualise current debates on the humanitarian endeavour and its future within recent geographical research. We then set out the complex structure by which COVID‐19 has been both imagined and intervened upon as a humanitarian emergency. In so doing, we then pave the way for a deeper empirical analysis of the spatial and temporal inversions that have been brought forth by COVID‐19. The paper concludes by examining the conceptual value of the 'inversion' in developing geographical research agendas better attuned to the increasing porosity of humanitarianism, development, and global health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographers have long been concerned with the spaces, scales, and conceptual significance of volunteering. They have, however, been slower to engage with the global surge in medical volunteering, whether in times of everyday or acute emergency. Volunteering is a crucial component of the architectures of global health and humanitarianism, but it remains marginal to the concerns of both health and development geographers. This paper seeks to address this lacuna through drawing on the case study of the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. When the outbreak was belatedly declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in 2014, volunteers flowed into Sierra Leone to aid in the response. In drawing on qualitative research with volunteers from a small, Freetown‐based NGO, we aim to close two explicit theoretical gaps. First, we draw out the geographical significance of volunteering during an outbreak of such exceptionality that the modalities, methods and architectures of global health and humanitarianism closed in on one another. Second, we explore how the act and experience of volunteering during the Ebola outbreak helped those involved apprehend what global health might mean and be. In so doing, we also reflect on the instrumental use of humanitarianism within a global health field whose professional contours are often remarkably difficult to navigate. In empirical terms, this intervention is rendered even more significant given the discipline's wider neglect of the Ebola outbreak as a crucial moment where the failures of global health were exposed and the toolkits of humanitarian intervention were pushed to their limits. This paper explores the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone to examine (1) the geographical significance of volunteering during an exceptional outbreak and (2) how the act and experience of volunteering helped those involved apprehend what global health might mean and be. In so doing, we reflect on the instrumental use of humanitarianism within a global health field whose professional contours are often remarkably difficult to navigate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]