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Repertoires of repair: managing ontological insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article examines the practices used by people who, while in a state of crisis, attempt to restore the sense of continuity and dependability in their environment that is a prerequisite for meaningful social action. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 115 people conducted during the catast...

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Published in:Social Forces Vol. 105; no. 1; pp. 36 - 54
Main Authors: Hagen, Ryan, Milstein, Denise
Format: Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Sep2026
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Sep2026
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        10.1093/sf/soaf178
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        atl: Repertoires of repair: managing ontological insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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          Hagen, Ryan
          Milstein, Denise
        affil: Department of Sociology, Columbia University, Knox Hall, 606 W 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027, United States
      keyword:
        cognition
        copyrightHolder:University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
        copyrightYear:2026
        culture
        inLanguage:en
        publisher:Oxford University Press
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        social change
        cognition
        copyrightHolder:University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
        copyrightYear:2026
        culture
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        publisher:Oxford University Press
        risk
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        social change
      ab: This article examines the practices used by people who, while in a state of crisis, attempt to restore the sense of continuity and dependability in their environment that is a prerequisite for meaningful social action. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 115 people conducted during the catastrophic first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, we identify major categories and triggers of disruption as well as what we call the "repertoires of repair," socially learned practices employed to bridge these ruptures. We find two main categories of repair work: changes to the socio-material environment of action, and changes to cognition. We refer to these categories as "agentic enactment" and "cognitive grounding" respectively. In our conclusion we suggest some implications of seeing ontological security as an ongoing relational achievement rather than a latent state of individual psychology. Challenging a transformational bias in sociology, we call for further research on the cultural work people do to produce continuity against continual disruption, and how even these efforts can paradoxically result in unintended social change.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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