COVID-19 from the Margins: Narrating the COVID-19 Pandemic Through Decoloniality and Multilinguism

Abstract

Born as a multilingual blog in May 2020, 'COVID-19 from the Margins' has offered a space for authors to voice the silenced narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic in any language chosen and representing multiple South(s) of the world (Milan & Treré, 2019). The blog became an open-access book in February 2021, and since then it has travelled across the globe to bring to light narratives of devoiced groups during COVID-19, generating debate on stories narrated by, amongst others, forced migrants, gig workers, ethnic minorities, people in economic poverty, and survivors of domestic violence. The project is divided into five sections - "Human Invisibilities and the Politics of Counting," "Perpetuated Vulnerabilities and Inequalities," "Datafied Social Policies," "Technological Reconfigurations in the Datafied Pandemic," and "Pandemic Solidarities and Resistance from Below" - which together contribute to the decolonial, multilingual project of narrating the COVID-19 pandemic through the voices of the systematically silenced. In this short paper, we reflect on the 'COVID-19 from the Margins' experience and on its meaning towards a decolonial, multilingual narration of the COVID-19 pandemic.