Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that longer U.S. histories of instrumentalising contagion, coupled with the recent sharp rise of xenophobia, compelled (im)migrants to "care" for themselves and their communities in ways that often-contradicted public health advice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic upended domestic and international movement through lockdowns, strict testing regulations, and quarantines. In the United States, Title 42 was established, allowing for the rapid expulsion of migrants at the border because they “threatened” the health of the nation as potential sources of COVID-19. In Philadelphia, home to a fast-growing West African diaspora, discourses about moral responsibility, communal care, and individual protection from disease emerged as the official motivations for the COVID-19 vaccine, even as hesitancy consistently remained high among African (im)migrants. Yet these discourses of concern and care exist within a kaleidoscopic immigration system in which (im)migrants and asylum seekers are constantly tested, evaluated, documented, and surveyed by physicians, judges, and immigration authorities not for the health and safety of the individual in question, but to “protect” the nation and body politic into which they seek residency. In turn, rejection of the vaccine was frequently positioned as a form of pre-emptive protection from a vaccine which many believed was purposefully designed to cause irreparable harm to Black Africans. This paper argues that longer U.S. histories of vilifying migrants as sources of contagion, coupled with the sharp rise of xenophobic policies initiated during the Trump administration, compelled (im)migrants to “care” for themselves and their communities in ways that often-contradicted public health advice throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. By analysing how local and national government discourses of protection were experienced, accepted, and/or contested within Philadelphia’s West African diaspora, this paper questions why, and for whom, is social care practiced?

Paper short abstract:

A healthy multiculturalism, as one of the founding myths of Singapore, has been hegemonic in its construction of a coherent nation, where “racial harmony” is proffered as a social good to be gotten at all costs. This paper considers both the discursive control of race from the perspective of those who pay the costs of harmony.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, issues of race and racism in Singapore have gained unprecedented public visibility and attention. The troubled conditions of the Covid19 pandemic have exacerbated the situation, opening up a space for a more sustained critique than previously experienced in a nation-state built on a discourse of a healthy multiculturalism. The latter, being one of the founding myths of Singapore, has been hegemonic in its construction of a coherent nation, where “racial harmony” is proffered as a social good to be gotten at all costs. Complementary to this image of what constitutes a healthy nation is that of underlying “primordial fault lines” and “tribal instincts” that must be constantly kept in check. The recent outbursts have been co-opted by state actors as yet more evidence to support and in fact strengthen their position institutionally. This, however, has the effect of disciplining the counter-discourse and expressions of racialized others within the nation-state. The ethnography on which this paper Is based follows some of the public occasions and contexts in which the state attempts to control the discourse on race by setting the terms of “conversations” as well as some of the voices that refuse to be erased. Together, they raise questions about the costs of maintaining the coherent nation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how White British slaughterhouse workers navigate stigma, reproducing discursive racialised hierarchies about Asian and Polish co-workers and the halal sheep meat they produce, connecting localised configurations of white Britishness to imperial constructions of national purity.

Paper long abstract:

After the Brexit referendum, moral panics emerged in political narratives about the future of British sheep and the presence halal slaughter in Britain, making rhetorical claims about who and what belongs in a coherant, healthy nation: sheep had a native blood and soil belonging; slaughterhouses were abject zones where “British” people didn’t want to work, and that halal slaughter was an abject foreign practice, rendering Muslims as culturally incompatible to civilised “British” ways of life. However, these narratives silenced how the British sheep industry is shaped by both the mobiltities of Britain's colonial past and post-colonial present, and imperial narratives of purity and abjection.

This paper explores how White British slaughterhouse workers, whose livlihoods are dependent on the demand for halal meat, navigate the stigma of their labour as uncivilised and un-British by reproducing discursive racialised hierarchies about their Asian and Polish co-workers and the halal meat they produce. Drawing on criticial race and feminist theories of abjection, I explore how "whiteness" and "Britishness" are locally constructed as both persistent and fragile. In these fleshy material sites of physical labour, I make the case that it is dialogue and narratives often rooted in Empire and British exceptionalism which are employed as pertinent discursive strategies of inclusion and exclusion, even though they do not relate to material, physical, or economic realities.

Paper short abstract:

Women's bodies are oscillating symbols of modernity and tradition. By investigating the "bodily constructions" of Chinese women in Lisbon, I seek to understand how they process rationalizations and emotions within broader structures of local, national and transnational moral economies.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021 the Chinese government's education minister issued a statement suggesting that young Chinese men were becoming too "feminine". The "Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents" pointed out that the country's male role models were no longer athletic figures, army heroes, but boy bands and television figures, who embodied a "weak and timid" Chinese man.

For the rulers of the Chinese nation, men should be masculine, and women feminine. There is a whole intense academic production on how women's bodies are seen as producers of a national ideology. As representatives of a nation, women are natural 'bearers of tradition' through their domesticity and motherhood (e.g. Chatterjee 1990; Gaitskell and Unterhalter 1989; Yuval-Davis 1997), but at the same time symbols of the country's modernization through discourses of labour power, political involvement and sexuality (e.g. Foucault 1988; Shilling 2003; Yuval-Davis 1997). These bodies, nevertheless, can also be medically produced (e.g. Edmonds 2007; Aizura 2009; Hua 2013). Working with Chinese women in Lisbon, some born in the country, others with different migratory paths, I try to understand how they manage the different social pressures to conquer a 'valid' body standard. How do you embody the modernity so popularized in China and recreate it in a European nation? How is the relationship of rationalizations and emotionalizations played out in practice? What are the broader structures of local, national and transnational moral economies that help us to better understand the processes of aesthetic body transformation they undergo? and to what end?