Meeting Your Neighbor For Another First Time: The Work of Second-order Reflexivity in Communication During the COVID-19 Emergency in Italy

This piece acknowledges the role that a capacity for second-order reflexivity plays in communication—specifically after the latter has been disturbed by the need to adopt hygienic measures in social contact to face the COVID-19 medical emergency. After the Italian government issued recommendations for halting contagion, gestures (hugging, kissing, leaning in) that would customarily enter the fold of communication no longer remained available, generating interruptions. Interruptions challenge the continuation of the social milieus in which we participate most intensely—friendships, family relations, civil society—and engender a risk of loss of agency. Autoethnographic vignettes of micro-interactions in which participants negotiate interruptions due to the hygienic measures point to a crucial role played by the capacity for second-order reflexivity. This capacity sustains the work of orienting oneself and others to the difficulties that interrupt joint action, and of re-inviting cooperation in the co-construction of a shared world. In so doing, reflexivity constitutes an important frontier of capacity building, for increasing the resilience of our social worlds in the face of disruptive events.