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- Convenors:
-
Clara Saraiva
(ICS, University of Lisbon)
Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
COVID-19 has shown us how it is important to develop ethnographic sensibilities, and that this requires collaboration. This session is designed to draw together participants' unfolding inquiries on pandemics, beyond Medical Anthropology, joining scholars from various fields and perspectives.
Long Abstract:
Even as we attempt to keep SARS-CoV-2 viruses away, we are all infected by viral waves of naturalcultural forms that seek to make COVID-19 feel frighteningly close or comfortingly far away, to amplify or disappear its effects on space, relations with humans and nonhumans, psyches, etc. Given their scale, heterogeneity, and global dispersion, developing ethnographic sensibilities adequate to pandemic encounters requires collaboration, and this session is designed to draw together participants' unfolding inquiries. Like the epidemiological contours of the disease, it is impossible to determine in advance the subjects and objects, technologies and infrastructures that will form the crucial foci of attention in June, 2021, but our present projections include (but are not limited to) the following: complex entanglements of forms of political and scientific-medical performance, including politicians' voicings of anti-science and anti-state discourses; attempts by public health "experts" to dominate narrative production and circulation by suppressing proliferating forms of popular knowledge deemed conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and myths; COVID-19 vaccines as loci of salvation, anti-vax fears, and pharmaceutical windfalls; ludic and artistic responses to pandemic angst; shifting regimentations of lives and spaces through COVID-19 metrics and statistical imaginaries; processes and effects of the virtualization of communication, sociability, and education, including Zoom bombing and fatigue; complex relations between journalism and social media; and intersections between epidemiological recognition of racialized differences in COVID-19 infection and death rates and widespread demands to confront racism and racialized forms of violence. The organizers seek to maximize the range of geographic, disciplinary, and analytic perspectives included.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Much has been written about covid-19 as disease and as sickness, often in a militaristic vocabulary. This paper analyses conversations conducted on zoom or equivalent with interlocutors willing to talk about their illness experience.
Paper long abstract:
Much has been written about covid-19 as disease and as sickness, often in a militaristic vocabulary. However, ten months into the pandemic, research into the narratives of common people who believe they had covid-19 and recovered, to whatever degree, are still quite uncommon. This paper analyses conversations conducted on zoom or equivalent with 2 x 30 interlocutors, friends of friends, recruited through the snow ball method, willing to speak to the two co-authors, one in her 20s, the other in her 60s. It aims to identify themes of concern which include age related illness experiences, and their severity, co-morbidities and experiences of treatment and recovery (or not). Its focus is on acute episodes of covid-19, but it does not exclude participants wishing to speak about long covid.
Paper short abstract:
During Covid19, UK government alternated contradictory rules: restrict socio-economic interaction to save lives lost to infection; restore the economy to save lives lost though unemployment and stress. Was this prioritization of the economy a preparedness to ‘sacrifice’ lives to the virus?
Paper long abstract:
During the Corona virus pandemic, the UK government used variously changing slogans to try and limit contagion (e.g. “Wash hands, protect the face, keep socially distant and save lives” – reduced pithily to “Hands, Face and Space”). Alongside this apparently civic/humanitarian call is a parallel government insistence on keeping the economy going. This was sometimes presented as more important to life than simply following personal safety measures: with the alternative of unemployment and associated stress seen as likely to kill more people than the virus itself. In other words, economy comes first, this being justified as in the end as reducing the incidence of disease and death. Can we therefore look at this prioritizing of the economy (in the guise of economic-human balance) as in fact an implicit if unwanted preparedness to ‘sacrifice’ lives to Covid19? Since most such lives lost will be of the elderly or infirm, is this tantamount to a “cull” of those perceived to be unproductive (too old or sick) and therefore socially dispensable?