Lisa Diamond set out to understand and quantify a feeling that many people struggle to describe.
It’s a feeling she became well acquainted with during the pandemic: a low-level sense of unease. It’s not quite full-blown stress. It’s not an emotional response to a direct attack, but more the discomfort of wondering: Am I safe? Do these people care about me? Would they protect me?
“The feeling of being uncertain and unprotected was not the same feeling as stress,” Diamond realized. “It was a different sort of feeling, a kind of deeper form of chronic vigilance, watchfulness and wariness.”
The pandemic brought these feelings out in a lot of people. Diamond, a distinguished professor of psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, is interested in understanding how marginalized communities experience that sense of unease.