Essential workers and the cultural politics of appreciation: sonic, visual and mediated geographies of public gratitude in the time of COVID-19

Abstract

What do sonic, visual, and mediated forms of public gratitude for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic tell us about the cultural politics of the category “essential worker”? What racial, gender, and class structures and processes shape the content, form, and composition of these collective practices of appreciation? In this paper, I draw on my participation in a nightly ritual of collective applause in Vancouver, Canada, my encounters with homemade banners in my neighborhood, and my own familial histories and relationships to essential workers to examine cultural practices of gratitude. I observe that collective and public expressions of gratitude are shaped by existing structures and discourses of material inequalities, which manifest in hierarchical valuations of differently positioned essential workers. Cultural practices of gratitude, I show, can inadvertently serve to obscure the existence and continuation of these hierarchies by flattening or narrowly circumscribing who counts as an “essential worker” during the COVID-19 pandemic and, thus, limiting just whom public and collective expressions of appreciation are for. As cultural geographical doings, such landscape markers and spatial performances of gratitude serve to emplace and, thus, reinforce existing social hierarchies, suggesting the need for other more socially just spatial enactments of gratitude.