When therapy is transferred online due to COVID-19, and bodies no longer meet in person, the space of the psychoanalytic consulting room is unsettled: distance, risk and intimacy are negotiated anew.

Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. Common, as opposed to public infrastructures of transit, suggest ways of organizing mobility in resistance to state apparatuses of violence, exclusion and accumulation.

While police continue to kill Black people on city streets, private equity firms tacitly engage in anti-Black violence through dispossession, devaluation and displacement in Black communities, and thus more broadly by remaking the map of where Black people can live, move, and breathe.

This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the interconnected goals of indigenous politics. Thus, it is not possible to address it solely as a health emergency. It is connected to indigenous autonomy and self-determination. It is connected to the exploitation of land and the territory. It is connected to the rights of indigenous peoples to continue to exist and exercise their cultures.

It was clear to us that everything we had been feeling - the isolation, the competition, the exhaustion, the frustration - was not something unique to our own graduate experiences.

The global pandemic has occasioned an impulse to think in monumental terms – totality, catastrophe, portal. This essay commits to a different reading that stops the rush of planning and forecasting, projecting and forecasting. It offers collective life as an analytic that keeps the focus on the ways in which the urban majority is trying to survive and cope within structures of inequality that now bear both the new imprint of COVID-19 while equally holding the continuities of older forms of distancing and exclusion.

The flourishing landscape of solidarity initiatives that emerged during the corona crisis became an object of consensual appreciation. Even critical thinkers overlooked the intensifying influence of neoliberal logics on this impressive grassroots awakening. Highlighting these logics could assist in freeing our quotidian solidarity activities from the attempts to neutralize its political potential.

Being public is essential to social and political life. Political counterpublics, including the growing “climate public” and “mutual aid public,” will be part of any just post-Coronavirus future. As the crisis continues, they are building themselves through various spaces and spatialities of publicness.

Contemporary nativist logics, evident in the Right’s responses to coronavirus, stand poised to converge with a budding conservative climate politics that conveniently pitches the militarization of borders as a core piece of “our” contribution to combating a warming and unsteady world. Climate change looms as a powerful frame in the nativist politics of the future, and anti-immigrant sentiment is likely to flourish in the conservative environmentalism to come.

Perhaps we do need a cultural politics of urban tastes. But perhaps what is more urgent right now is for geographers to engage in an anti-racist cultural politics against yellow perilism and all other forms of structural racism that the pandemic heightens.