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Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Mishuana Goeman in Mark My Words talks about remapping as a way of rethinking space and temporality, so the future is driving the study of the past and the past is interrogated for the future.

Goeman uses the fiction of Native women to push forth the idea that words don’t only represent reality, arguing that by using narrative “in (re)mapping, we as Native people have the power to rethink the way we engage with territory, with our relationships to one another, and with other Native nations and settler nations” (38–39).

So imagining spatial encounters and relationships is actually a way of mapping alternative relationships

Massey’s understanding of space is the “product of interrelations,” “spheres of possibility,” “and always under construction or a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (6-7), so space is a meeting of histories.

What histories are meeting now? Maybe more importantly, whose histories are meeting? I think this is where scalar analysis can come in to complement Massey’s thinking about space.. to start to tease out a bit these entangled encounter or meeting space, knowing it will never fully be disentangled.

 

Also, when think about Massey’s line of space as a meeting place, something always in transit, I’m thinking specifically of encounters. And space/place as encounter. And stay at home orders rethink the way many of us are encountering each other, also in certain contexts, especially for those with the privilege of staying at home, change encounters are being lost. The sort of tranistness of space is being lost.

Rabach Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

I’ve been thinking a bit with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “abject” status (the excess, to cast away, the throw away) which she pulls from Judith Butler and spaces of liminality. The subjective experience of an abject status intersects so harshly with systems of power, the economy, national policy, etc. So, thinking about spaces of abjection. Who occupies this space during this time? How is it changed? How is it being embodied?

Gonzales, Roberto G., and Leo R. Chavez. 2012. “‘Awakening to a Nightmare’: Abjectivity and Illegality in the Lives of Undocumented 1.5-Generation Latino Immigrants in the United States.” Current Anthropology 53 (3): 255–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/665414.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2012. “BEYOND THE NAMES OF THE PEOPLE: Disinterring the Body Politic.”Cultural Studies 26 (2–3): 370–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.636206.

RabachK Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

In our group we had Dr. Jessica Sewell come speak to us a little while ago about her book Women and the Everyday City and we landed on the topic of “imaginaries of space” for a long time. And the visual politics of space- so how do we notice things? What do we notice? What seems out of place or in place. Thinking about how imaginaries make certain presences completely invisible (thinking here about gendered labor, black labor, and more). And how powerful imaginaries are, how they intersect with our construction of language. But also how resistance can work with these imaginaries.. thinking about women’s sort of take over of dept stores during the suffrage movement as an extension of their private space, a space for organizing. This is long winded way of trying to think through COVID-19 national models in the context of national imaginaries. What has been puzzling me is so many Americans’ response to the Swedish model of governing in Covid and how imaginaries of Sweden have been warped in such a way that there is a complete erasure of how xenophobic policies have gained traction in Sweden in recent years.  

Rabach_Theorizing Place and Covid 19

kaitlynrabach

Gendered Spaces – We keep seeing these headlines over and over  (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/15/world/coronavirus-women-leaders.html) and I think there’s a lot more analysis that needs to happen here.. But women leaders = success in governance in these reports and I think we should complicated this more. What does this look like from the scale of the body to national political offices?

 

Failed governance - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-lawmaker-armed-escort-rightwing-protest

^ For many this is failure, but for others the ability to have militarized weapons in the state capitol is a success. So how do we blur the boundaries between success/failure?

 

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joerene.aviles

While the practical yield of such circumscribed inquiry has been enormous, exclusive focus on molecular­level phenomena has contributed to the increasing “desocialization” of scientific inquiry: a tendency to ask only biological questions about what are in fact biosocial phenomena [1].

What would happen if race and insurance status no longer determined who had access to the standard of care?

Sometimes public health crises, such as the AIDS pandemic in Africa, can lead to bold and specific interventions, such as the campaign to provide AIDS prevention and care as a public good [54].

In this struggle, equity in healthcare is our responsibility.

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joerene.aviles

The main arguments in the article are that globalization has created new threats to the public health and security on a global scale, with biological threats the foremost concern. "Biosecurity" is the goal, which looks at public health preparedness at all levels (local, national, international, global) with four domains: "emerging infectious disease; bioterrorism; the cutting-edge life sciences; and food safety." Despite increasing defenses and plans for current threats, the article notes that we need to become better at predicting new threats and identifying risks to biosecurity while adapting to changing political, environmental and infrastructure factors that create difficult ethical decisions. 

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joerene.aviles

The college was created to continue New York State's position as a leader in homeland security, cybersecurity and emergency preparedness and as a response to the growing need for professionals in those fields. Advances in technology, and increased threats to terrorism and cybersecurity in the past few decades called for the formation of this college. Overall it was a strategic political and economic decision by Governor Andrew Cuomo as it would provide training in a field that's expected to grow by 650,000 employees (for cybersecurity) in the next decade*.

*http://www.albany.edu/news/57214.php

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joerene.aviles

The narrative is sustained through Atul Gawande's experience and research into improving his end-of-life care for his own patients by meeting with other healthcare professionals (oncologists, palliative care experts and surgeons), and analyzing his actions with his father. The film has strong emotional appeal, as loss of loved ones is a common experience, and difficult for all parties involved. 

Scientific info isn't really in depth (disease processes aren't talked about) mostly just psycho-social aspects discussed.