Analyze

The sign pictured talks about 3 heroes.  A moral economy of COVID-19: Essential workers are called heroes in order to justify the risks they must take with their lives.

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?

This article includes information gathered by research from the two authors themselves as well as their publications, but it also sites other articles that have been pulished by other researchers in the field. 

The most persuasive/ compelling parts of the film include narratives of the family members of those affected with cancer. One of the more emotional segments included the death of a Marine that the film had been following. 

Verified members can post pictures of patient's, tests, equipment, or images as long as there is not patient identifying information. All members of figure one are encouraged to comment and discuss the condition or test in the picture. 

The article's main idea is supported by the use of statistics, historical analysis, and personal anecdotes of immigrants going through the system.

I looked further into governmental relief policies  after disasters, mental health policies in regard to emergencies, and New Orleans current state. 

Professionals could use data from this study to further research the affects of nuclear radiation on the human body. 

Miriam Ticktin received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Ticktin is now an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility.