Reclaiming the social from 'social distancing'

It is hard to reconcile a discipline that is founded on the slow, measured reasoning of ethnographic fieldwork with reactive commentary on current affairs. But all the while the neoliberal university has made many of the social sciences increasingly introspective, one consequence of the COVID"19 pandemic is that we are in a historical moment which demands us to engage in public debates about core issues of our discipline such as the construction of social relations in everyday life and the very nature of social formations.