Misrecognizing Class in the Age of Covid-19: The Aspropyrgos Case and the Media

Through a tentative analysis on media material collected during the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Greece, the chapter aims at a better grasp of how the affluent and educated Greek middle classes cannot fail to misunderstand those occupying precarious and working-class locations. Drawing from previous socio-spatial explorations of landscapes of class that emerge in the case of the western suburbs of Attica, the chapter offers the contours of the unacknowledged sentiments of the middle classes each and every time they encounter classed alterity. Limiting the scope of analysis to a short period of heightened public concern over the disproportionally high infection rates in West Attica and Aspropyrgos, the study brings to the fore three distinct discursive patterns, which are entangled with the attribution of responsibility and the biopolitics of Covid-19: a discursive pattern based on compassion and acknowledgment of inequality as the most relevant probability raiser of the dispersion; an expansion of this pattern to an anti-capitalist direction; and a third pattern based on cultural particularities as interpretative framework.