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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Hsu
(University of Oxford)
Gillian Chan (University of Oxford)
Sonora English (University College London)
Yasmynn Chowdhury (University of Oxford)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 19 January, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Research on and during a pandemic is mired by limitations. This panel brings together medical anthropologists who have worked on different aspects of COVID-19. The sessions will focus on the inequalities observed in COVID-19 and the methodologies employed by anthropologists researching the pandemic.
Long Abstract:
The round table will focus on the: 1) the inequalities observed amidst the pandemic and, 2) methodologies employed by anthropologists researching the pandemic. In our first session, we explore the inequalities observed when a critical gaze is turned on the intersectional dynamics of gender, class and race as played out across the globe in Brazil, India, and the UK, tracing these differentiated experiences in care institutions, the digital landscape, and the wider population. In the second, we discuss the diverse and creative methods employed by anthropologists amidst COVID-19, in China, Pakistan and the UK, and the fraught positionality of the anthropologists observing, researching and being themselves enmeshed within the pandemic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 19 January, 2022, -Daniela Calvo (Kyoto University)
Paper short abstract:
Since the spread of Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, incidence of contagion, death, access to treatment, perception of risk and socioeconomic crisis affected people differently, on the basis of racial, geographical and socioeconomic condition.
Paper long abstract:
Covid-19 pandemic may be better described as syndemics, a concept introduced by Merrill Singer e Emily Mendenhall, to describe a situation in which bacteria or viruses take action in human societies, interacting with a series of factors, such as: socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, genetic and gender inequalities, geographical factors, public policies, urban architecture, religions, science (and its negation), public investment, drugs and vaccines, negationism, fake-news, etc. This perspective allows to consider illness, specifically Covid-19, as an assemblage, a multidimensional mesh, that interweaves biological, social and cultural issues in individual and social process of disease and health.
Even if, at the beginning, the coronavirus has been defined as a “democratic virus”, it has revealed soon different degrees of vulnerability among the population, whose life conditions have also been differently affected by pandemic and the consequent sanitary, economic, social, politic and information crisis.
Focusing on racial inequalities, that intersect with economic, social, geographic and gender differences and reproduce the slavery system, I explore the differences in risk perception and vulnerability (expressed in the number of deaths), as well as the different impacts of syndemics (manifest in the increase of unemployment, poverty, psychological problems, family conflicts, difficulties in facing social isolation, homework and online schooling) in Brazil. I also point out some collective actions of resistance and organization to face syndemics in marginalized social and religious groups.
Sarah Spellman (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
What has COVID-19 revealed about boundaries and stratifications of power, and how might it lead to their reinforcement, their destabilisation, or elements of both? I explore this question through ideas of risk and otherness, used to contrast discursive and material treatments of UK ‘key’ workers.
Paper long abstract:
What has COVID-19 revealed about boundaries and stratifications of power, and how might it lead to their reinforcement, their destabilisation, or elements of both? One way to explore this question is through ideas of risk and otherness, used to contrast the discursive and material treatments of UK ‘essential’ or ‘key’ workers. The socioeconomically marginalised status of many of these workers, as it intersects with the way the UK has acted on notions of risk, lends itself to an examination informed by anthropologist Mary Douglas’ work on risk theory. I propose to incorporate elements of Douglas’ thinking to describe narratives that emerged early in the pandemic and how they have acted as a form of positive or laudatory othering in reaction to risk. The dynamic I explore is one in which economically essential workers, many of whom are in low-wage, precarious roles, receive praise as opposed to the more negative forms of othering more often used in the reinforcement of marginalisation. Despite the heroic reception of essential workers by the public and state, there have been no substantive moves toward changes to pay, conditions or insecurity in certain economically essential sectors. It is possible that laudatory othering has served as one of the phenomena driving social inertia and perpetuating pre-pandemic distributions of power. Theoretically informed analyses of the interplay of social inequalities and crisis narratives may help to focus research efforts relating not only to Covid-19 but to future pandemics and the biosocial heterogeneity of the consequences of disease more generally.
Ishtiaque Ahmed Levin (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks to understand emergent public health infrastructures of recovery in India which are articulated by human-nonhuman entanglements, technological devices, telecare, mobile apps, media flows, state and non-state apparatuses, and emerging forms of digital communication.
Paper long abstract:
The Covid-19 pandemic is the concrete manifestation of the ontological insecurities of the Anthropocene. The pandemic demonstrates that the nonhumans can turn into influential agents of history who are capable of disrupting the social order. The emergent public health infrastructures of recovery in India contain webs of associations including telecare technologies, mobile apps, media flows, state and non-state apparatuses, and so on. The global pandemic strengthened a biopolitical order governed by the medical authorities. As everyday activities were jeopardized by the pandemic, zoom calls, virtual communication, email exchanges, telecare, and other virtual activities proliferated to an unprecedented extent. The overwhelming digitalization of social activities now ensures the immunological integrity of people. The quarantined individuals are now protected by a complex assemblage of technological apparatuses. Considering this transformed postdigital reality, this paper seeks to understand the emerging public health infrastructures of recovery in India. The Covid-19 pandemic created a postdigital condition where the virtual and the real can no longer be separated. The virtual which is immanent to the webs of technologies is now assembling the social. The virtual has become a new terrain for activism, healthcare, academic interaction, community mobilization, and artistic practices. Therefore, the emerging postdigital infrastructures of recovery include various webs of associations established between human and technological assemblages. By mobilizing various methods pertaining to medical Anthropology, this paper seeks to understand emerging public health infrastructures of recovery in India which are articulated by human-nonhuman entanglements, technological devices, and emerging forms of digital communication.