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The Sapelli smartphone application aims to support any community to engage in citizen science activities to address local concerns and needs. However, Sapelli was designed and developed not as a piece of technology without a context, but as the technical part of a socio-technical approach to establish a participatory science process. This paper provides the methodological framework for implementing and using Sapelli in the field. Specifically, we present the role of Sapelli within the framework of an “Extreme Citizen Science” (ECS) methodology that is based on participatory design. This approach enables Sapelli’s users to decide, with the help of professional scientists, which challenges they wish to address, what data to collect, how best to collect and analyse it, and how to use it to address the problems identified. The process depends on the consent of participants and that the project is shaped by their decisions. We argue that leaving ample space for co-design, local leadership and keeping Sapelli deployment open-ended is crucial to give all people, and in particular non-literate people who we have found are often the most ecologically literate, access to the power of the scientific process to document and represent their concerns to outsiders in a way that all can understand, and to develop advocacy strategies that address the problems they identify.

In the initial phase of COVID-19, Aotearoa New Zealand was internationally praised for its pandemic response that included lockdowns to control the spread and work toward elimination. Community compliance with control measures was thus essential when pursuing elimination as a policy. Using a mixed-methods approach, we sought to explore whether New Zealand Police (NZP) were trusted to police the lockdown rules at Levels 4 and 3. We analyzed 1,020 survey responses comparing trust among respondents who had been stopped by NZP over the lockdown rules (contacts) with those who had not (non-contacts). We found that both contacts and non-contacts expressed greater trust in NZP to enforce the Level 4 than the Level 3 rules; contacts expressed less trust in NZP to enforce the lockdown rules than non-contacts; contacts perceived NZP more heavy-handed than non-contacts; contacts perceived NZP as only somewhat procedurally just and feeling somewhat encouraged to comply with the lockdown rules and; that unexpected high-profile policing-related events during the survey only affected contacts’ trust significantly. We offer two explanations: (1) NZP were perceived as procedurally unjust or inconsistent in applying the lockdown rules, (2) members of the public and NZP learned the lockdown rules simultaneously. We caution that the unfamiliar character of pandemic policing may jeopardize trust in NZP even among segments of the population that typically express high levels of trust in NZP, that is, people of European descent. We conclude that community compliance with pandemic control measures is no matter to be dealt with by the criminal legal system.

This article explores some of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a collective critical event for anthropologists and other social scientists, examining how it has promoted new configurations of the research imagination. We draw on our own experiences of participating in a team of 17 researchers, hailing from anthropology and anthropology-adjacent disciplines, to research social life in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the pandemic, examining how our own research imaginations were transformed during, and via, the process of our collaboration. When our project first began, many of us had doubts reflective of norms, prejudices and anxieties that are common in our disciplines: that the group would be too large to function effectively, or that it would be impossible to develop an approach to authorship that would allow everyone to feel their contributions had been adequately recognised. In practice, the large group size was a key strength in allowing our group to work effectively. Difficulties with authorship did not arise from within the group but from disconnects between our preferred ways of working and the ways authorship was imagined within various professional and publishing bodies. We conclude that large-scale collaborations have many points in their favour, and that the research imaginations of funders, journals, universities and professional associations should be broadened to ensure that they are encouraged, supported and adequately rewarded.

Among Jú|’hoànsi in the northern Kalahari, there are differences in the way people address their suspicions about what others might be thinking or feeling – in other words, in the way people confront the opacity of other minds. Among friends, playful forms of mockery allow people to express their suspicions or ill-feelings directly, without the fear of causing harm. Among relatives, by contrast, suspicions and ill-feelings are typically concealed. While people may talk about other minds when those minds are not around, they refrain from direct confrontation. To confront one’s relatives is to make them feel ‘pain in their hearts’, and to do so is to risk losing them to sickness or damaging enduring arrangements of care. Ancestors and shamans, who can see and hear more than others, play a crucial role here in governing opacity: exposing suspicions and ill-feelings when people feel they cannot speak of them.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic reached Aotearoa New Zealand, stringent lockdown measures lasting 7 weeks were introduced to manage community spread of the virus. This paper reports the findings of a qualitative study examining how lockdown measures impacted upon the lives of nurses, midwives and personal care assistants caring for community-based patients during this time. The study involved nationwide surveys and in-depth interviews with 15 registered nurses employed in community settings, two community midwives and five personal care assistants. During the lockdown, nurses, midwives and personal care assistants working in the community showed considerable courage in answering their ‘call to duty’ by taking on heightened care responsibilities and going ‘the extra mile’ to help others. They faced significant risks to personal and professional relationships when they were required to take on additional and complex responsibilities for community-based patients. Despite the hypervigilant monitoring of their personal protective equipment (PPE), the need to safeguard family and community members generated considerable stress and anxiety. Many also faced personal isolation and loneliness as a result of lockdown restrictions. Moreover, the negative impacts of experiences during lockdown often continued to be felt once restrictions had been lifted, inflecting life during periods in which community transmission of COVID-19 was not occurring. This article makes five core service delivery and policy recommendations for supporting community-based nurses, midwives and personal care assistants in respiratory disease pandemics: acknowledging the crucial role played by community-based carers and the associated stress and anxiety they endured by championing respect and compassion; demystifying the ‘heroism’ or ‘self-sacrifice’ projected onto care workers; the timely provision of adequate protective equipment; improving remuneration, with adequate provision for time off; and reg

In 2020, the government of Aotearoa New Zealand imposed some of the most stringent funerary restrictions in the world as part of its efforts to eliminate COVID-19. This article explores how people experienced this situation, asking why restrictions that some described as precipitating ‘the most difficult time of their lives’ were described by others as a ‘relief’, ‘blessing’, or ‘gift’. Much existing literature frames funerary restrictions as a distressing assault upon established ways of grieving to which mourners must try to adapt–and in Aotearoa, both the stringency of the restrictions and the means by which they had been imposed did lead to many people finding them challenging. However, for those with ambivalent pre-existing feelings regarding their funerary traditions–such as many in the Samoan diaspora–COVID-19 restrictions afforded both a reprieve from burdensome practices and a much-welcomed opportunity to reimagine their traditions. Funerary restrictions, though disruptive, are thereby shown to have generative potential.

Dealing with excess death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the question of a good or bad death' into sharp relief as countries across the globe have grappled with multiple peaks of cases and mortality; and communities mourn those lost. In the UK, these challenges have included the fact that mortality has adversely affected minority communities. Corpse disposal and social distancing guidelines do not allow a process of mourning in which families and communities can be involved in the dying process. This study aimed to examine the main concerns of faith and non-faith communities across the UK in relation to death in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research team used rapid ethnographic methods to examine the adaptations to the dying process prior to hospital admission, during admission, during the disposal and release of the body, during funerals and mourning. The study revealed that communities were experiencing collective loss, were making necessary adaptations to rituals that surrounded death, dying and mourning and would benefit from clear and compassionate communication and consultation with authorities.

International media have praised Aotearoa New Zealand for its response to the coronavirus pandemic. While New Zealand Police played a fundamental role in enforcing pandemic control measures, the policing landscape remained plural. This article employs Loader [2000. Plural policing and democratic governance. Social and legal studies, 9 (3), 323–345] model of plural policing to understand responses to public health emergencies. It identifies two forms of policing which were evident in Aotearoa during the COVID-19 lockdown that should be added to Loader's model. First, we argue that contexts with colonial history require that the model not only includes by-government and below-government policing but also next-to-government policing by Indigenous peoples – such as the 'community checkpoints' run by Māori. Second, and further developing Loader's model, we argue that the category of below-government policing be expanded to include 'peer-to-peer policing' in which government responsibilizes members of the public to subject each other to large-scale surveillance and social control. Since plural forms of policing affect each other's functionality and legitimacy, we argue that what happens at the synapses between policing nodes has profound implications for the process of community building. Because community building is essential to fighting pandemics, we conclude that the policing of pandemic intervention measures may require an expanded understanding and practice of plural policing to support an optimal public health strategy.

COVID-19 stories, especially from Aotearoa New Zealand as one of the leading nations ‘winning’ over the virus will be important historical documentation. The ‘team of 5 million’ is writing its narratives of life with/out COVID-19 – stories of ‘living in bubbles’, of ‘being kind’ and ‘being in it together.’ These are narratives of success which need to be examined alongside the narratives that have been absent from public national discourse but complicate understandings of ‘winning.’ To that end, in this article we map out (alter)narratives from supermarket and healthcare workers and highlight their stories of living and caring under lockdown. We posit that we need to pay attention to (alter)narratives of winning over COVID-19 in order to pay attention to the bodies and spaces that are often invisible but make winning possible. Thus, we see (Alter)narratives not as counter or anti to the nation’s winning narrative, but rather essential and adjacent.

Lockdowns imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 have been widely shown to heighten care burdens within households and ‘bubbles.’ Responsibility for meeting such burdens often falls disproportionately upon women. It is nevertheless important for research on gendered inequalities during COVID-19 to attend to the particularities of how such care work was experienced by differently positioned women. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Indonesian migrant mothers’ experiences of lockdown were mediated by the disadvantages they faced as ‘non-native’ speakers of English, as well as by the ideology of Ibuism (‘motherism’) they were socialised into during their lives in Indonesia. This socialisation led many to find life under lockdown life both rewarding and stressful in ways distinct from other women and mothers in Aotearoa New Zealand who were confronting similar demands. We thus argue for the importance of a qualitative and intersectional approach.

Over forty-nine days of Level 4 and Level 3 lockdown, residents of Aotearoa New Zealand were subject to ‘stay home’ regulations that restricted physical contact to members of the same social ‘bubble’. This article examines their moral decision-making and affective experiences of lockdown, especially when faced with competing responsibilities to adhere to public health regulations, but also to care for themselves or provide support to people outside their bubbles. Our respondents engaged in independent risk assessment, weighing up how best to uphold the ‘spirit’ of the lockdown even when contravening lockdown regulations; their decisions could, however, lead to acute social rifts. Some respondents–such as those in flatshares and shared childcare arrangements–recounted feeling disempowered from participating in the collective management of risk and responsibility within their bubbles, while essential workers found that anxieties about their workplace exposure to the coronavirus could prevent them from expanding their bubbles in ways they might have liked. The inability to adequately care for oneself or for others thus emerges as a crucial axis of disadvantage, specific to times of lockdown. Policy recommendations regarding lockdown regulations are provided.

This report presents initial research findings on the ‘social bubbles’ policy that the New Zealand government adopted as part of its strategy for curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The concept of ‘the bubble’ proved effective at conveying the necessity of exclusive containment, while foregrounding the importance of mutual care and support that might stretch beyond a single household or home. It allowed New Zealanders who were isolated, vulnerable, or struggling to receive the care and support they needed. This success partly resulted from the strong emphasis placed on ‘being kind’ within the New Zealand government’s public narrative of the lockdown. Bubbles were expanded when it would keep people ‘safe and well’. There was high compliance with the mandate to keep bubbles exclusive, and the concept of exclusivity within an expanded bubble was generally – if not always – well understood. Adaptation to ‘the bubble’ as a new social form was not always straightforward, however, and bubble relationships could be strained by divergent risk perceptions, or differing interpretations of ambiguous guidelines. Moreover, some groups systematically found it harder to enjoy the full benefits of living in a bubble: people living in flatshare arrangements, co-parents living apart, recently arrived migrants and people who were active in the workplace. Once infection rates are sufficiently low and appropriate contact tracing infrastructures are in place, a social bubbles policy could be very effective in other countries, especially if concrete steps are taken to pre-empt some of the difficulties and inequalities that were evident in New Zealand.

The trickster has held a prominent place in the study of folklore, as much as it has been central to anthropological understandings of egalitarianism. In both, the trickster embodies an insoluble tension between the repressed, amoral desires of the individual and the moral demands of social life. This tension, so it goes, is visible in the ambiguity of the figure—a protean indeterminate being, neither good nor bad. Among the Jú|’hoànsi of northeastern Namibia, the trickster is similarly ambiguous. The figure conveys not a clash of values, but rather the doubt and uncertainty people feel toward those with whom they share resources, or about different ways of sharing and how they might relate to one another. This article approaches such uncertainty through a focus on the mocking phrase “you’re a trickster” and the moral discourses that accompany it.

Dealing with death and bereavement in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic will present significant challenges for at least the next three months. The current situation does not allow for families andbcommunities to be involved in the process of death in ways in which they would normally hope or expect to be. In addition, mortality rates will disproportionately affect vulnerable households. The government has identified the following communities as being at increased risk: single parent households; multi-generational Black and Minority Ethnic groups; men without degrees in lone households and/or in precarious work; small family business owners in their 50s; and elderlyhouseholds. Our study focused on these groups. This report presents a summary of findings and key recommendations by a team of anthropologists from the London School of Economics who conducted a public survey and 58 cross-community interviews between 3 and 9 April 2020. It explores ways to prepare these communities and households for impending deaths with communications and policy support. More information on the research methodology, data protection and ethical procedures is available in Appendix 1. A summary of relevant existing research can be found in Appendix 2. A list of key contacts across communities for consultation is available on request. Research was focused on “what a good death looks like” for people across all faiths and for vulnerable groups. It examined how communities were already adapting how they dealt with processes of dying, burials, funerals and bereavement during the pandemic, and responding to new government regulations. It specifically focused on five transitions in the process of death, and what consultation processes, policies and communications strategies could be mobilised to support communities through these phases.