CONFINED will develop and validate an innovative, comparative, and global research agenda of confined lives. Confinement is a ubiquitous and unequally distributed human condition. While confinement sometimes can be protective, for some groups, not least the displaced on dangerous roads, the marginalized in urban slums and the detained in prisons, it can be a damaging experience linked to violence and inequality. With an empirical point of departure in different contexts across the global north and south, known to produce a variety of confined lives, CONFINED explores, 1) how certain people’s lives are rendered confineable; 2) how confineable groups and networks navigate discursive, actual, and potential practices of confinement, and 3) how and to what extent the concept of confined lives can transform our understanding of the practices and experiences of confinement across global divides in ways that drive theoretical innovation and help build new agendas for social justice. Through three interdependent and sequentially organized work packages, CONFINED proposes to explore confined lives contextually and ethnographically across the global North and South (WP1); to compare what confines people, how they make sense of their confined lives, and how they navigate confinement (WP2), and to conceptually develop and validate the approach through engagement with academics and experts locally and globally (WP3). CONFINED will carry out comparative, ethnographic field work to follow precariously situated translocal family network across four contexts as a privileged lens to understanding confined lives at the intersection of dangerous journeys, urban slums and prisons and camps: Denmark and Lebanon; South Africa and Malawi; Thailand and Myanmar and the UK and Sierra Leone. This will allow CONFINED to reframe the empirical field of confined lives and to generate a new conceptual language to understand one of the most important drivers of inequality world-wide.

In this project, we will evaluate the use and performance of a CE-marked device (wearable), which uses sensors to measure breathing rate, pulse rate, skin temperature, and heart rate variability for the purpose of early detection and monitoring of COVID-19 in general and high-risk populations. At the same time, a mobile application will be used to track participant-reported symptoms. A prospective, observational study will follow 13,000 individuals from the general population and 7,000 high-risk individuals wearing the device and responding to participant self-report parameters via a purpose-designed app. Based on this data, an algorithm will indicate which individuals likely require general practitioner (GP) care (for COVID-19 diagnostic testing, further vital signs assessment, and/or treatment) and/or hospital care. To evaluate algorithm performance, the cohort will be tested for COVID-19 antibodies at the end of follow-up. COVID-19 seropositivity in the intervention cohort will be compared seropositivity in a control population of 20,000 individuals drawn from the same populations using the application only. Thus, this project will deliver a large body of information on COVID-19 PCR testing and antibodies that can be used to develop additional diagnostics and therapeutics in addition to validating remote vital signs and self-reported symptoms monitoring systems.