Analyze

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.

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.
  
  The referenced media source is missing and needs to be re-embedded.
  
  
  
• 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?

Several sources are utilized in compiling Dr. Knowles' argument. Much of the historical information comes from first-hand accounts provided at the time and compiled for posterity. A good portion of information also emerges from news articles produced in the wake of the event. This includes interviews and press releases. Historical court documentation and correspondences between parties are used for depiction of events and subsequent investigations. Several aanalysis pieces by historians also appear to be used. When discussing the parallels between scenarios, Dr. Knowles relies on his own logic to fully connect the events.

The article pays tribute to the development of immigrants into French residency due to medical issues. Should an immigrant have a serious medical condition, and be unable to procure adequate medical care in their home nation, they would be given residency. This was a curious ascent for immigrants in status; the loss of immigrant workers as an integral portion of the economy had led to a general public distaste for immigration.

The very nature of the law made it very subject to individual interpretation-- creating divisions within the health care system. Fassin notes some instances where this interpretation caused the law to fail; discontinuity between medical professionals created situations where similar conditions were met with opposing decisions. Moreover, as cited by Fassin, this also led to several scenarios where doctors allowed their personal opinions on immigration to sway their decisions.

1) "Interventions in the acute phase directly following the disaster are designed to promote survivors’ safety and stability and to help them cope with their experiences (12). One such intervention, psychological debriefing or critical incident stress debriefing, was developed in the 1980s for emergency responders and has been used with other victims of trauma (46)."

2) "Exposure to potentially traumatic events is disaster-specific and often measured differently between studies, making it difficult to compare experiences and mental health consequences or to generalize findings to all disaster-affected populations (22). Additionally, most instruments that assess symptoms of mental disorder have been developed and validated in the United States (23, 48) and may lack cultural relevance and validity in areas impacted by disasters worldwide"

3) "These studies can help us understand what factors are associated with different courses of mental illness, which can help us identify the most vulnerable populations and inform tailored interventions"

Obviously, the individual testimonies hold enormous emotional power. Having a tearful mother share of her grief at losing two children, watching former marines such as Denita McCall fight for their lives against cancer, or seeing Mike Partain's massive spreadsheet of male breast cancer incidence all strike deeply. Yet, the most compelling piece was early on in the film. Ensingmer and Partain visit a cemetery near Camp Lejeune. While there, they note the sheer number of graves from between 1957-1987-- the vast majority belonging to infants and children. This, personally, was the most moving; witnessing the sheer number of lives  lost while hearing the excuses and lackluster responses of governing bodies demonstrated just how dire this situation was.