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- Convenors:
-
Clara Saraiva
(ICS, University of Lisbon)
Charles Briggs (University of California, Berkeley)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Health and Medicine
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 22 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 Tuesday 22 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Lessons learned from how a Chinese medicine clinic in London, as a representative and epitome of ethnic Chinese in the UK, fought against the COVID-19.
Paper long abstract:
Panic of COVID-19 started in China in the early January. Then, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the outbreak of the viral pneumonia as a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the pandemic started to raging across the world. At this time, I had the opportunity to record the experiences of working in a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) clinic based in Chinatown, London. I took participant observation as the method to collect data in this study and recorded findings in written diaries.
This clinic exists at the settlement gathering a great number of the ethnic Chinese population and employs all Chinese staff, and thus it has high sensibility to the information from China. As early as the late January, the clinic noticed the epidemic from the social medias in China, and was aware that personnel exchange would cause global virus problem. The clinic required its staff to wear face masks and disposable gloves at as early as the end of January, and the clinic also sold the anti-viral goods. Then before the publication of the UK anti-pandemic guideline, the clinic prepared TCM remedies for “strengthening body condition and fighting the virus”. Though the effects of such actions remain unclear so far, the clinic preformed high level of alert, and helped some Chinese communities in the UK to prepare for the pandemic. It is of importance to learn lessons from how the clinic, as a representative and epitome of ethnic Chinese in the UK, fought against the COVID-19.
Paper short abstract:
The epidemic of the COVID-19 infectious disease began on November 17, 2019 in China. Since then, social media such as Facebook has become a place of support for people who treat the pandemic as a global fake news, as well as an excuse to unleash an economic war between China and the United States.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores Polish-Chinese migrations of social narratives, such as urban legends or conspiracy theories, in opposition to human migrations during the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic. The text draws attention to the dialectics of vernacular and institutional discourses and their interdependence. The narratives collected here are hybrids of both, media reports, perceived as fake news, conspiracy theories, which are in opposition to common institutional narratives, or urban legends, which, depending on their source, will be considered as vernacular narratives, where the "authentic voice of the people" is heard or institutional narratives based on government content. Media censorship in China is an area of filtered information with an emphasis on the control and supervision of flowing content. However, the transmission of often unwanted narratives crosses territorial boundaries, spreading and mutating around the world. The apparent lack of control over the information flowing out has increased the usability of the transmitted content, and the "word of the street" has become a common tool of manipulation, where it slowly loses its emancipatory value.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to study how complex entanglements between COVID-19 guidelines from The Public Health Agency of Sweden and the civil society developed during the first months of the pandemic. What kind of “COVID cultures” emerged in this organizations?
Paper long abstract:
This paper is based on interviews with organization representatives for three different civil society’s organizations in Sweden: women's shelters, homelessness organizations and deacons. From March 2020 I have followed how they have adapted their work in relation to the risks that the emerging infectious disease SARS-CoV-2 viruses evokes. It has been short telephone interviews that only give a glimpse of the complex practice in the everyday work with people in vulnerable situations. Isolated women and children at risk of violence, older people with very few contacts or people that has no home. The aim of this paper is to study complex entanglements between this organizations and the COVID-19 guidelines from The Public Health Agency of Sweden. What kind of “COVID cultures” emerged in this organizations? How are the guidelines translated into practice in this organizations? What similarities and differences are there between the organizations? What infrastructures are changed and what have consisted over time? How has this affected the work with people that even before the pandemic was in vulnerable situations? Or with other words, what kind of “COVID cultures” have emerged in this organizations during the first months of the pandemic? With this kind of questions I hope to analyze the complex entanglements there are between the knowledge production in different political and scientific-medical performance – read guidelines – and civil society’s organizations.
Paper short abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic influences dying, death practices, and mourning. People are often reduced to data points. Using a qualitative approach, we study the experiences and emotions of persons who had to undergo the death and funeral of close family members during the strict lockdown in Croatia.
Paper long abstract:
There were numerous and significant challenges in the process of death, dealing with death and bereavement during the pandemic. We explored the experiences and emotions of persons who had to undergo the death and funeral of close family members during the strict lockdown (from March 20th to May 6th) and the most restrictive measures introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Croatia. Guidelines regarding handling bodies, carrying funerals, and burials affected dying, death, and mourning, resulting in changes in funeral practices and rituals. Recommendations included silent funeral within the closest family circle, and mourning in isolation. Semi-structured in-depth, face-to-face interviews with family members who lost loved one during the strict lockdown identified dying and grieving alone in isolation as the most important issues. Bereaved have different experiences if death was caused by COVID-19. Furthermore, there were differences in silent funerals and mourning traditions between rural and urban areas. Mourners accepted the new rules and adapted to them by modifying the grieving process and inventing new practices. Also, they found forms of opposition to changed funeral practices and subversion of given regulations. The lack of known rituals, traditions, and grieving practices caused feelings of insecurity and even guilt among the bereaved.
Paper short abstract:
From approaching Pandemic from the analytical lens of the ways in which people demand and express ways of living (and dying), in this presentation I am interesting on showing the multiple forms that “pandemic” acquired in Argentina.
Paper long abstract:
From approaching Pandemic from the analytical lens of the ways in which people demand and express ways of living (and dying) -with special attention to the ways in which they conceive and experience isolation policies-, in this presentation I am interesting on showing the multiple forms that “pandemic” acquired in Argentina.
The pandemic put life forms at stake and has generated processes of uncertainty. Advancing along this path, investigating the way in which moral regimes are stressed, allows us to see the multiplicity of ways of understanding what is happening today.
My argument is that although Pandemic is global, it is also eminently local. The Pandemic is a social product in the way it is managed, as it has been built into a public problem, and in its effects. It is from here that we can understand the existence of these multiplicities of ways of living isolation as well as the solutions that are wielded in such a situation. The way in which people act and generate social forms of seeing, demanding, living the quarantine and the pandemic depends on moral frameworks that are disputed and that are publicly expressed. I will center on three of these forms of legitimation: Health, economy and care. From here I will show the way people mobilized moral and public arguments, the way care, economy and health are space of dispute and forms of constructing and demining for a way of living.
Paper short abstract:
The current work focuses on the application of machine learning and natural language processing to discovering the underlying narrative frameworks in social media discussions that focus on the Covid-19 pandemic, its causes and its spread.
Paper long abstract:
In early 2020, the world realized that the respiratory illness which had first been identified in the far east at the end of 2019 was not only highly contagious and dangerous, but also had made the fairly easy jump to the global stage. Since so little was known about the virus, and since various governments had either directly or indirectly caused people to have little or no trust in readily accessible information sources, the environment was well primed for the emergence of numerous unofficial narratives intending to explain the pandemic. With social media being broadly available, and with its global reach presenting the possibility of a near-instantaneous communication channel, the spread of stories and story parts along these channels was rapid. Consequently, social media became a heavily used medium for the circulation and negotiation of beliefs concerning the virus. While in many past crises the problem for understanding has been access to too little information, the Covid-19 pandemic may actually have swung in the opposite direction, with too much hard to evaluate information being available. In our work, we attempt to discover and track the emergence of narrative frameworks--a dynamic network graph representing the actants and their interactions--across multiple social media sites (Reddit, 4Chan, 8kun, Facebook). The goal is to understand the how the narrative frameworks emerge, stabilize and solidify, as well as to see if we can identify structural features of these networks that differentiate a narrative complex such as a conspiracy theory from other types of narrative frameworks.