With 'lockdown' having been a near-global experience for the past several months, and with restrictions now increasingly being relaxed in many places around the world, perhaps the time has come for some reflections on what ‘staying at home’ has meant for members of the extended community of the Global History and Culture Centre. We pride ourselves on our boundary-crossing research, our international partnerships and, when we are feeling hubristic, our global reach. So, what did we do, when we suddenly all had to stay home? In this blog, GHCC director Anne Gerritsen reflects on the detailed responses she received on a question she posed to the GHCC community: ‘What has been specific to your local situation?’ It is the second post in a brief blog series on GHCC and the pandemic (see the first post here).

Early in May, already several weeks after the start of what seemed a near-global ‘lock-down’ policy, the director of the Global History and Culture Centre, Anne Gerritsen, wrote to past and present members of the Centre to inquire about their experiences of the pandemic. Of the 130 members of the extended GHCC community she contacted, a total of 45 responded with descriptions of life in lockdown from Berlin to Tokyo to Caracas. In this first of a small series of blog posts, Professor Gerritsen introduces the short survey she sent out and amalgamates the answers she received to the first question: where is the wider GHCC community spending the weeks and months of this first global pandemic of our lifetimes?