Dr Athanasia Chalari (Visiting Senior Fellow, October 2020 - September 2023) and her collaborator (Ms Koutantou, University of Essex) focus on the exploration of the concepts of Crisis and Social Change through Greek Lived Experiences of COVID-19 Pandemic. Their present study explores the ways Greek individuals have experienced the state of crisis while coping with the pandemic of COVID-19. The purpose is to re-examine the ideas of crisis and social change through the lived experiences of this unprecedent pandemic. The study started as an exploration of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on Greeks while experiencing some of the strictest pandemic measures in Europe, however, it expanded in a wider study including and comparing narratives of Greek participants residing in 13 countries around the globe, and therefore experiencing social distancing measures in different levels of intensity. The empirical collection of 46 interviews has been conducted during the critical time of April 2020. The underlying purpose would be to reveal lived experiences of COVID-19, as a significant component which should be added in our wider understanding of this pandemic as a crisis. This study aims in incorporating diverse subjective experiences deriving from different participants who, at the same time, share common grounds in terms of cultural backgrounds. The distinctive response Greece has followed towards COVID-19 formed a preliminary platform of common ground that participants could be sharing. Furthermore, Greece has recently started overcoming a prolonged socio-economic crisis lasting over a decade, resulting in severe social transformations affecting, inter alia Greek people’s ways of living, well-being and crisis coping strategies (Chalari & Sealey, 2016; Chalari & Serifi, 2018; Chalari & Koutantou, 2020). One of the main consequences of the Greek crisis involves a large migration wave of brain drainers residing abroad who maintain connections with homeland and share common cultural background (Chalari & Koutantou, 2020). Although Greek economy remains fragile and rather weak, the Greek government was one the few to impose extreme lockdown measures as a respond to COVID-19 outbreak. As Greek people had suffered over a decade of severe social, economic and political transformations, an exceptional research opportunity has emerged, while observing how the global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic caused even more intense social transformation in everyday lives allowing established as well as new coping strategies to emerge. Additionally, the sizable Greek diaspora who have left Greece before or during the crisis, have also experienced lockdowns on various different places around the globe. Such realisation offers a first-class opportunity to compare and contrast the narratives of Greek people who have gone through the consequences of a prolonged crisis, while having to confront an even more intense period of social and economic transformations while residing in Greece or abroad.
Publications:
Narratives of Leaving and Returning to Homeland: The Example of Greek Brain Drainers Living in the UK, Athanasia Chalari and Efi-Irini Koutantou, SAGE Journals, 29 October 2020
Psycho-Social Approaches to the Covid-19 Pandemic
Change, Crisis and Trauma, Athanasia Chalari, Eirini Efsevia Koutantou, Palgrave, 2022
Why Resist?: opposition to mask-wearing during the covid-19 pandemic in Greece, Athanasia Chalari, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, July 2022
Η Πανδημική συνθήκη. Δι-επιστημονικές προσεγγίσεις και ερμηνευτικές συνθέσεις, Athanasia Chalari, Kardamitsa, 2022