How the COVID-19 Virus Shaped Smell Research: One Researcher’s Tale

This chapter is concerned with the experience of living through lockdown in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand. It is written from the perspective of being a town resident and also a researcher whose usual objects of investigation were inaccessible during this time. Like many academics around the world, the on-set of the pandemic dramatically altered daily teaching and research endeavours (Thorpe et al. Physical activity and bodily boundaries in times of pandemic. In Lupton and Willis (Eds.), The Covid-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives (pp. 39–52). Routledge, 2021). These activities were suddenly cast entirely online as individuals simultaneously scrambled to adapt to home-life ‘in a bubble’. To make sense of these momentous changes, I sought to research the experience of lockdown in my local community. Drawing from sensory methodology, ‘smellwalks’ were adopted to capture lockdown life by walking through the neighbourhood and using smell to apprehend this space. Utilising this sensuous and embodied method was a political response to the overarching and official characterisation of the pandemic in terms of rates of infection and death. These portrayals which dominated government and media representations were typically disembodied and detached from the affective experience of living through the pandemic in a locked-down community. Smellwalks were an attempt to know the pandemic differently, paying attention to its mundane and nuanced manifestations and offer an alternative narrative. This chapter reveals one academic’s response to characterising the disruption of this global crisis to daily life in a middle-class suburban town where risk of infection was relatively low. It also delineates how the pandemic has shaped normal research agendas prompting experimental methods that embrace embodied and sensory elements of this global event.