Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on the lives of workers with occupational diseases during the pandemic in Turkey. It illustrates how for these workers the pandemic's financial, health-related, and bureaucratic uncertainties unfold as embodied experiences, and how they endure the multiple crises of the Covid-19.

Paper long abstract:

When exploring the impact of the pandemic on human health, medical anthropologists tend to focus either on the experiences of patients with chronic illnesses or the experiences of those who are dubbed as “essential workers.” What if somebody is simultaneously a worker and suffers from silicosis, a chronic illness while facing the risk of coronavirus infection amid pandemic uncertainties? Our research with workers who suffer from silicosis due to their occupations in three different cities of Turkey reveals that for these workers, the uncertainties of the pandemic turn into embodied experiences at three levels. First, they develop extreme body consciousness (i.e. wearing masks regularly, daily body care, managing physical distance) due to uncertainties surrounding the risk of infection. Second, there is increased reflection on what household members eat, drink, how they keep their bodies warm, how often they move their bodies, and to what ends. They thus develop awareness about how bodies consume and reproduce at the household level due to economic uncertainties. Third, these workers do not quite know how well their bodies are doing, due to the postponement of visits, assessments, treatments, and prescriptions. Thus they learn to live with an ambiguous illness in the context of bureaucratic, legal, and medical obstacles that are intensified with the pandemic. The embodied uncertainties paradigm demonstrates how vulnerable groups maintain control of their lives against these uncertainties by controlling, regulating, reflecting on the movements and capacities of their body as well as the bodies that surround them.

Paper short abstract:

National health policies to combat the coronavirus in Brazil were the result of power struggles that often clashed with scientific recommendations. This proposal deals with the effects that these policies had on vulnerable populations in the interior of the state of Paraíba.

Paper long abstract:

In Brazil, the health crisis caused by the coronavirus has worsened social inequality. Not only are the deaths recorded by COVID-19 in the country demonstrably higher in poor, black and peripheral populations, but these were also the populations most affected in their socioeconomic conditions over the years 2020 and 2021. This situation was significantly worsened because of the inefficiency of national policies to fight the virus. The narratives that guided these policies did not follow what was recommended by the scientific community or the WHO. Instead, they were the object of dispute by various political agents, including the President of the Republic, health authorities, state governors, who went from complete denial of the dangers of the disease and encouraging the use of ineffective medication, to the hasty relaxation of distancing and contingency measures. As a result, the country recorded more than 650,000 deaths and a socio-economic crisis that increased poverty levels disproportionately. Based on an ethnographic study carried out in three municipalities in Cariri Ocidental, a micro-region in the state of Paraíba characterized by high rates of inequality and extreme poverty, I propose to discuss how health policies were defined locally in response to these narrative disputes and which were its effects on the lives of residents.

Paper short abstract:

Deliveroo, Uber, Glovo or Bolt/Food are just a few names that have become entrenched in our societies, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. But less discussed is what does it mean to be a courier when your manager is an algorithm that monitors your every move?

Paper long abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to surface the reality of the under-belly "platform" or "gig" workers. "Platform capitalism" or so-called "sharing economy" literature argues that food delivery is a special case of platform mediated work. Food couriers experience a diminishing sense of self-esteem due to lack of retribution by the "mainstream" society for the work they carry out during chronic and ordinary times. Moreover, food delivery riders flooding the streets in developed countries are migrants, unlike in countries on the semi-periphery of globalization, like Romania, where most couriers are its nationals.

The first part of the paper focuses on the strategic role that migrant or non-migrant gig workers play in supporting communities in cities, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in four localities (e.g., observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations). The second focus of this paper is to conceptualise two distinctive, yet overlapping issues: a) platform mediated work shapes a purpose for partially and dependent food couriers, yet it only offers them precarious means to merely hang on at the edges of sharing economy; and b) despite the promises made, that sharing economy will bring about a "new way to work", the digitalisation of work through platform algorithms only exacerbate the existing inequalities through precarisation of working conditions. Drawing upon inequalities, precarity and migration scholarship, this ethnographic account's wider implications aim to impact the emerging digital anthropology field and invites scholars to notice precarity and inequalities differently when conducting and disseminating future research on platform mediated work.