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 would love to have the community that has come together around this project to collaborate on creating some resources that could be interesting to broader academic and non-academic communities. For example, it would be great to work together to create some timelines on the platform around various themes relevant to COVID-19, and to do critical readings toghether of key scientific or official documents using the annotation features.

Beyond creating the "products" themselves, I think we would get a lot out of exercise in terms of thinking together on these kinds of projects.

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?

In the US, many public intellectuals on the left have been discussing how this pandemic has challenged the seemingly inevitable dominance of neoliberal governing regimes and ideologies, and has expanded the conditions of possibility for social democratic or socialist ideas and policies. However, the imagined post-neoliberal era is no necessarily concieved of in the same way.

A couple of helpful examples include:

• In a widely shared video (2020), Naomi Klein draws on her previous work on disaster capitalism in the Shock Doctrine (2007) to argue not only that “Coronavirus Capitalism” must be resisted, but that there are many social democratic ideas “lying around” that are both crucial to responding to the current public health and economic crisis, and made possible because of the shock to the system. These ideas include the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, canceling student debt, guaranteeing paid sick leave, and providing permanent shelter to the unhoused.
  
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• Marxist geographer David Harvey wrote an article (2020) for Jacobin magazine that examined the pandemic through the lens of Marxist theory of crises, examining the mutation and transmission of the virus through neoliberal globalization’s production of nature, the failures of neoliberal healthcare systems to respond, and the crisis that the pandemic and its response pose to most forms of consumer capitalism. He contrasts the current COVID-19 economic crisis with the Great Recession, and argues, among other things, that:

…the burden of exiting from the current economic crisis now shifts to the United States and here is the ultimate irony: the only policies that will work, both economically and politically, are far more socialistic than anything that Bernie Sanders might propose and these rescue programs will have to be initiated under the aegis of Donald Trump, presumably under the mask of Making America Great Again.

All those Republicans who so viscerally opposed the 2008 bailout will have to eat crow or defy Donald Trump. The latter, if he is wise, will cancel the elections on an emergency basis and declare the origin of an imperial presidency to save capital and the world from “riot and revolution.”

At least in these articles, Klein is essentially issuing both a warning and an optimistic call to action while Harvey seems to be arguing neoliberalism’s incapacity to deal with this kind of crisis may lead to an embrace of at least some aspects of a “left-leaning” economic policy regime, but one that may well be represented and enacted through a nationalistic lens, likely at the expense of left movements, civil liberties, democratic participation, internationalism/transnationalism, marginalized populations, and migrants.

Harvey, David. 2020. “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19.” Jacobin, March 20, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-econo….

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Macmillan.

———. 2020. “Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It.” Online Video. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/coronavirus-capitalism/.

Finding a way to protest while observing social distancing, Never Again Action is organizing people in the US to protest in their cars in front of immigration detention centers. They are calling on state govenors to release all immigrant detainees in order to protect them from dangerous, crowded, and unsanitary conditions.

This image is a screenshot of one of their Facebook posts about an action at the Hudson County Detention Center in Kearny, New Jersey on March 22, 2020.

(As of 3/22/2020) The Sunnyside Greenmarket (42nd &, 43rd Ave, Sunnyside, NY) in Queens, NY remained opened, but instituted several measures to comply with social distancing including:

• Preventing customers from handling produce
• Chalking the sidewalk to keep customers in line six feet apart
• Many of the vendors were wearing gloves and/or masks
• Food scraps were no longer being collected

Local grocery stores, however, were not instituting these kinds of policies. Aside from changing hours, providing (I assume) employees with gloves and masks, and, in some cases, providing an hour during the early morning for elderly shoppers, the practice of shopping saw little change (except, of course, for shelves that were more bare than usual).

• I am situated in New York, NY (Queens), and am teaching anthropology at John Jay College (CUNY) & STS at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
• I have been involved in the Disaster Studies Network for some time, focusing on slow disaster, nuclear waste, and remediation. I'm interested in what forms of public and collaborative STS can be developed, particularly during times of crisis.
• I can be reached at delatorre.pedro@gmail.com
• I am especilly interested in the following questions:
• How is the aftermath of COVID-19 crisis being imagined in different settings? How is this shaping beliefs, practices, and policies?
• How, in different settings, have dominant political regimes and ideologies shaped COVID-19 preparation and response?
• How is ‘social distancing’ practiced and interpreted in different COVID-19 settings?