Acknowledgements

The idea for this book emerged in early March 2020 when it became clear that COVID-19 was going to affect the lives of a large proportion of people on our planet in profound ways. Starting from the premise that an effective response to the pandemic depends upon people coming together and supporting each other as members of a common community, the aim of this book is to use social identity theorising to provide a comprehensive and integrated analysis of the psychology of COVID-19. This is a big task and it is not one we could have undertaken alone. Accordingly, as the list of contributors above indicates, we needed to approach a large number of researchers at the forefront of social identity theorising to help us develop and flesh out this analysis. The result is a book that is a hybrid between a monograph and an edited book. Although this is an unusual format, we believe that this structure allows us to showcase the power and excitement not only of social identity research but also of the collective processes this research involves. We hope you agree.

The way this book developed was also somewhat unusual. First, we not only experienced considerable time pressure to write the book within the time frame we set ourselves (less than two months), but also, given the rapidly evolving nature of the COVID-19 crisis, we needed to re-evaluate and re-think our analysis on an almost daily basis. We were studying a phenomenon that had not yet ended. Second, we wrote this book while self-isolating at home. Even though we are normally spread across the world in three different cities, and even though writing a book together would always have meant being physically distant, this somehow felt different. This was perhaps because it is the first time that we ourselves were not only researchers, but also participants and thus at the heart of the thing we were studying. Indeed, because we are still in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it is very likely that aspects of our analysis will be somewhat outdated and incomplete by the time the book appears, and readers should be mindful of this. Nevertheless, we are confident that much of the book’s content has enduring relevance – and indeed it was this that really motivated us to produce it.

What is clear is that both the time pressure and the immersion in the focus of study made this a unique book to write. In order to meet the deadline and to [Page xii]understand the daily unfolding dynamics world-wide, regular Zoom meetings and brainstorm sessions were essential, not just to coordinate the writing, but also to get a grip on the reality that was taking shape around us. The truly collaborative nature of this project hopefully shines through in terms of the level of integration across sections and chapters. This is a project built around partnerships, not personalities, and authorship (of both the book and the chapters) should be understood as a reflection of shared social identities (‘we-ness’), not of disconnected personal identities (‘me-ness’).

In the same spirit we would also like to draw attention to others who were invaluable in this collective endeavour. In particular, we are grateful to the team at SAGE, led by Amy Maher, who were enthusiastic about our plans from the start and have worked tirelessly to facilitate a rapid publication of this book. Thank you too to Christine McCoy and Joe Sheahan for their excellent support in proof reading and reference checking – all under a fair amount of time pressure. We would also like to thank the funding bodies, without whom much of the research that forms the basis of this book would not have been possible. Principal among these are the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council in Australia, as well as our respective universities: The University of Queensland, the University of St Andrews, and The Australian National University. It is our hope that this book will form a solid foundation on which future analysis, intervention and policy relating to the COVID-19 crisis can be built, and that it can help pave the way for a future together.