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- Convenors:
-
Alice Tilche
(University of Leicester)
Akshay Khanna (RAPT (Centre for Research, Activism, Performance and Theatre))
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- Discussant:
-
Lucy Lowe
(University of Edinburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates representations of suffering during the pandemic, the relationships of visibility/invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and its memory, and the ethical concerns that underlie the production of images.
Long Abstract:
Globally, the Covid-19 pandemic is being imaged and imagined through diverse ways and media. These images do not only exist in the realm of representation but have structuring effects on the unfolding and experience of the pandemic. Social media has emerged as a powerful tool for spreading (mis)information. However, it has also been key to the articulation of political society, through which communities act collectively, generate information, intervene in the public sphere and make claims of the state. This panel invites contributions focussed on understanding the visualisation of a range of different forms of suffering during the pandemic and its attendant reconfigurations of the social, economic and political spheres. In particular, we seek to understand how communities have been receiving and mobilising images. The panel will focus on understanding representations of suffering within images themselves and disturbing the political order of images - the relationships of visibility / invisibility that obliterate certain kinds of suffering and its memory. In the context of the democratisation of the ability to produce images we will revisit the 'child and vulture' debate, asking: what are the material, or ethical concerns that underlie the making of images during the pandemic? How are debates on the ethics of visuality reconfigured when a community itself is involved in the production, consumption and circulation of images? This panel is instigated by a collaborative visual art and research project that has been producing videos on the experiences of some of the most marginalised populations in India during the pandemic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 19 January, 2022, -Sanderien Verstappen (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Recurrent discussions in Visual Anthropology have considered filmmaking as a mode of theory construction. In this presentation, I show how the popular genre of Corona videos can become a mode of theorising the pandemic, through the lens of visibility/invisibility.
Paper long abstract:
During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful forms of expert and folk knowledges about the pandemic.
The genre of the Corona video, I suggest here, can be appropriated by anthropologists to create their own cinematographic interventions. If understood through the lens of visibility/invisibility, the genre can even become a mode of theorising the pandemic. I illustrate this idea through the short films that were created by my students in the graduate course “The Politics of (In)visibility” at the University of Vienna. Their films mimic the popular form of the short Corona video in brevity, style, and format, but also intervene by exposing some striking patterns of visibility/invisibility in conversations around the pandemic.
Gargi Mishra (Centre for Health Equity, Law and Policy) Vivek Divan (Indian Law Society) Disha Verma (Centre for Health Equity, Law Policy) Siddharth de Souza (Justice Adda Tilburg University)
Paper short abstract:
The COVID-19 and the Constitution resource was conceptualized by C-HELP and designed by Justice Adda. We aim to highlight how and why it's important to center rights in pandemic control and why such visualisation helps to attune law and policy responses to people’s lives.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 and the Constitution resource was conceptualized by the Centre for Health Equity, Law & Policy in the bewildering and unprecedented summer of 2020. Finding ourselves suddenly marooned in our homes but buffeted by sweeping law and policy directives that wrought alarming changes in our lives, we sought to document the outpouring of these regulations and laws. Our attempt was to bring a sense of order into the chaos of the pandemic and its law and policy response. We aimed to demonstrate how these policy and law responses aligned with India’s Constitutional obligations enshrined in the fundamental rights, the litmus test for justifiable legislation, and the ways in which the pandemic also produced a series of regulatory excesses. We also sought to present more bottom-up narratives of the ways in which people were impacted by the pandemic and the response or lack thereof. Through our “Stories of COVID-19”, designed by Justice Adda, we aimed to bring forth the material consequences that the pandemic has had on people’s lives across India.
Through our presentation, we seek to highlight the importance of centering rights in pandemic control and management, how we went about visualizing this for the project, and why such visualisation is important to relate law and policy responses that are attuned to people’s lives. We will explicate the philosophy underlying the project, who would benefit from the resource, and the lessons it may offer for building responses that are grounded in fundamental rights, to health challenges present and future.
James Rattee (London School of Economics and Political Science) Laura Bear (London School of Economics and Political Science) Nikita Simpson (SOAS) Suad Duale
Paper short abstract:
Over the last 18 months, the Covid and Care Research Group has collected ethnographic insights aimed at rendering visible this impact of the pandemic on inequality in the UK. In this paper, we explore how filmmaking can enable marginalised communities to convey their own narratives of resilience.
Paper long abstract:
During the Covid-19 pandemic disproportionate transmission and mortality, discriminatory government policies and stigmatising media narratives have worked to exacerbate existing forms of inequality and generate new forms of marginality across the UK. Over the last 18 months, the Covid and Care Research Group has collected ethnographic insights aimed at rendering visible this unseen impact, particularly on communities who have had to ‘turn-inwards’ to survive. These research efforts have been targeted at shaping policy at national and local level, but have drawn deeply on participatory, creative and citizen science methodologies at every stage of the process. We present insights and a short film from one such project, a participatory film-making process led by citizen anthropologist Suad Duale, a Somali psychologist, single mother and community activist from Birmingham. Together Duale and the LSE team sought to render visible the resilience and suffering of the Somali community. In this paper we reflect on core ethical concerns that arose in the process of filmmaking – how can participatory filmmaking be a rapid means through which people are able to convey their own narratives of resilience? What kinds of relational work are necessary to democratise the film-making process? In what ways do institutions have a role in legitimating these stories, and to what effect? Finally, how does the draw upon theories of visual representation and marginality to help embody the participants’ experiences?
Alice Tilche (University of Leicester)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we reflect on the images produced by some of India’s most marginal indigenous communities during the pandemic, and their reframing of ethical debates around representations of suffering. We examine their circulation, materiality and effectiveness in claiming memory against erasure.
Paper long abstract:
During the devastating Covid-19 pandemic, mainstream media has been busy erasing memory and its very possibility - by tweaking numbers, censoring the most direct and brutal images of suffering, and aligning with governments’ calls to ‘move on’ and ‘get back to normal’. This process of erasure is, although for different reasons, in line with institutionalised ethical frameworks for representing suffering, for instance in academia. Within the famous ‘child and vulture’ debate, photography emerges as an act of violence - a violence that is generally perpetrated by the observer separated from, and hierarchically superior to, the sufferer. In the context of the ‘democratisation’ of the ability to produce and circulate images by communities, however, the ethics of visuality have shifted. In this paper we offer a reflection on the images produced by some of India’s most marginal indigenous communities during the pandemic, with a focus on their reframing of ethical debates around representations of suffering. In the images we discuss, and in contrast to the images that officially circulate, death is not hidden but brutally exposed, and so is the ever thin threshold between life and death, human and non human. We see humans that are in reality dead (the poor are more dead than human), we see animals that are more like humans (they have morality that humans have lost), we see humans that are more like animals. We reflect on the circulation of these images, the medium of their circulation, and on their effectiveness in claiming memory against erasure.