In a landscape of successive "lockdowns" and the monotony of "medical authority" continuously calling us to sacrifice in order to "get our lives back," we conducted a multi-locational anthropological research.

From the perspective of health anthropology and critical disability studies, we traversed interdisciplinary ethnographic sites, conversing over a three-year period (2020-2023) with diverse subjects from the public and private health fields, public education, disability structures, public rehabilitation facilities, and refugee reception centers, and we collected narratives from patients in Covid-19 inpatient clinics.

The aim was to reinvent proximity in an extreme regime of "social distancing" with a dense description and interpretation of multiple testimonies and a rich archival material, so as to raise questions and concerns beyond the obviousness and hegemony of the "experts."

In this post-pandemic era, where the prefix "post" does not suggest an end but that we are still "under the influence" of this condition, issues emerge regarding how the "crises" (health, climate, and any future ones) continuously respond to and succeed one another.

Especially when in their name new obligations, new prohibitions, new lockdowns, new tele-life and digital transformations, new discriminations, and new conditions of social anguish and collective trauma may be established.

And if the so-called pandemic was a "state of exception," which permanently established new "familiarization conditions" with new regimes of discipline and social control, it remains, through this research, to leave the question open: "Have we gotten our lives back?"