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.