Analyze

This image reminds me of how mutual aid and communities keep each other fed, and safe, and how local practices are actually best practices. My own research， although not immediatley related to the specific public health concern of COVID, will focus on Indigenous food soverignty, particularly the right and autonomy to ferment and distribute alcohol (紅糯米酒) within the Amis community, and their current fight with the local health department on declaring whether or not their alcohol is "safe" for public consumption and distribution.

I've found myself returning to thinking about/around/within interstitial spaces of care, particularly within hospital settings, interested in how viral activity unsettles the ideas we have around space and boundaries, both biological and infrastructural. In COVID-19 pathology and response, the inbetween, the interstitial, become sites challenge and possibility. With COVID-19, we see an acknowledgment of once forgotten spaces quite obviously, with hospital atria and hallways being reconfigured into patient care spaces, makeshift morgues established in refrigerated trucks, and hospitals spilling out into neighboring streets and parks. More than ever, we see how hospitals are simultaneously bounded and unbounded--the most stable and unstable sites for care. Along this line of thought, what might thinking through hospitals as heterotopia of crisis and deviation afford?

Foucault outlines six principles for heterotopic spaces

The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible

Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications.

I'm currently based in Troy, NY where I recently completed a PhD in Science and Technology Studies.  I'll soon be living in NYC to attend medical school. I can be reached at amorgan14[at]gmail[dot]com

I've long been interested in the disaster of routine medical care in the U.S. healthcare system. As far as COVID-19 is concerned, I'm particularly interested in how the long-term health impacts of intensive care are conceptualized and communicated (including Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS)) and the tensions between acute and chronic illness, broadly. 

How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?

Since I've-Been-Violated was the only one I could figure out, I have a detailed description:

The app starts with a registration page asking for name, phone number, and email. It also asks for access to the camera. The next page is a terms of use defining the contract you are entering when downloading and registering for the app. The information page has instructions:

1. Begin to tell your story by following the on-screen instructions. The Red Button will start and stop the video recording. You have the option to record an individual video is needed. There wil be three separate screens, each prompting you on what to say.
2. An encrypted record of you story is created and stored for future retrieval (through the proper channels) on our offline storage servers. NO video will be available directly to you or anyone else.
3. When and if you are ready to tell your story to the appropriate authorities, the app will bolster your credibility by giving these authorities access to evidence that you recorded approximately contemporaneously with the incident.
4. Please consider getting help from the appropriate medical authorities.

The interface is simple with a button to start the log, the info button, and the personal info icon (wich you can update)

The app has several partners, such as the Medical University of South Carolina, the Student Doctor Network, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital.

The purpose of this program is to educate students to become global leaders (dubbed Phoenix Leaders) in radiation disaster response. The program aims to use experience from the aftermath for Hiroshima to create an overarching program of “Radiation Disaster Recovery Studies”, with multiple disciplines of Medicine, Environmental Studies, Engineering, Sciences, Sociology, Education and Psychology. The eventual aim is to create a new and evolving system of response, safety, and security. 

There doesn’t seem to be much coverage for the program, and it is pretty obscure outside of academia.

The membership is mostly volunteers. Anyone who volunteers to donate blood, work at a center, or provide care is automatically a member of the organization as a whole. Of course, they have employees as well to provide professional care services and the organization is governed by a board as well as a CEO and President. 

"'In the globalized world of the 21st Century,'... simply stopping disease at national borders is not adequate"

"Early advocates of such [biodefense] efforts...argued that adequate preparation for a biological attack would require a massive infusion of resources into both biomedical research and public health response capacity" 

"Security experts and some life scientists worry that existing biosafety protocols focused on material controls in laboratories will not be sufficient as techniques of genetic manipulation become more powerful and routine, and as expertise in molecular biology becomes increasingly widespread."

"In all of them, we find that health experts, policy advocates, and politicians have competing visions about how to characterize the problem of biosecurity and about what constitutes the most appropriate response. Thus, the question is not just whether certain events (or potential events) have been characterized as "biosecurity" threats that require attention; we also need to ask what kind of biosecurity problem they are seen to pose, what techniques are used to assess them, and how certain kinds of responses to them are justified" 

The article was written in a very "flowery" style typical of fictional and/or emotionally appealing narratives. That being said, the majority of the information used was requoted or cited from articles and books recounting the major events. The portion on 9/11/2001 is largely based on reports from the incident, first hand accounts, and the author's personal opinion.