Precarious Heroines (& Heroes) in a Protracted Crisis: Reflecting Fragility Between Crises and Normalities

Nurses and frontline health-workers received much applause for their important contribution during the pandemic and were even depicted as heroines and heroes. Thereby, the fragility and the vulnerability of the care – and particularly the nursing – sector has been acknowledged in policy frameworks on the international and national level alike. Subsequently, nurses have been demanded to strengthen their disaster literacy in order to increase the nursing system’s overall resilience. However, the underlying fragile structures causing that fragility have remained untouched. Using the case of the recently emerging German resilience policies, I argue that this development is the result of a lopsided understanding of resilience, which should refer to fragility as an ontological condition. This contribution challenges the dichotomy of disruptive crises on the one and an innocent normality on the other hand. I argue that crisis and normality are not distinct or even dichotomous categories, but mutually interdependent and even interlinked. While classical security policies aim at mitigating ontic crises (manifesting crises), resilience policies should aim at mitigating the vulnerability resulting from the fragility of every social entity (ontological crisis). What is generally called a resilience policy is still deeply entrenched in security thinking, as it focuses on the ontic (acute) crisis. Drawing from fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic with employees of ambulant nursing services and disaster authorities, I discuss these claims from a nursing-angle. The pandemic crisis appears not as a distinct urgency, but as a continuation of a permanent (ontological) crisis of the German nursing-systems. In other words: The crisis at hand is normality. The call for disaster to tame the acute crisis does little to cure this ontological crisis. Yet, it follows a classical security rationale that responsibilises nurses and renders them to the precarious heroines (& heroes) of an otherwise unchanged, fragile system.