Analyze

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 this artifact, there is evidence showing resilience in Newark, New Jersey. After hurricane Sandy, Newark is now planning more for climate change and future threats to public safety and the environment

The poor monority children are more with exporation dates. Neighborhoods with highly concentrated poverty have higher crime rates, higher rates of chronic illness. This extremely troubling because theses children are not riskes at birth. This extremely troubling when these children are already brought into the world with a birth defect rate higher than the national average  in almost all catagories

NJPAC and the performing arts school are providing relief to communities vulnerable and affected by the hurricane. These people include the homeless, people that lost their homes to damage, and people that lived near the shore.

Once the abandoned waste was discovered, authorities sent trained professionals with the best safety gear to remove the waste from the abandoned home quickly and cleanly.

The common nessesaties that arent given to children in the essex county ultimately handicap the community around them. All the issues directly influence the parents, and the state; because with all of these issues are things the government has a level of control over. By not trying to findd solutions so child poverty the state continues to have to fun child care, enrichment programs that are costly which we current cant afford. The quality of these programs slowly does down until they become another vulnerability themselves

After Hurricane Sandy, John Schreiber, the CEO of NJPAC, announced that he along with the arts center was going to provide relief for victims of the hurricane. This agency is working hard to minimize the damage of the victims of the hurricane

Brian Conover, the man convicted of abandoning the waste, had left vials of blood along with needles that still had blood on them. The law requires that he properly dispose of these materials, but he had left the objects in his home when he moved out.

Vulnerability the quality or state of being exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally. When dealing with the children living in poverty in essex county this is assess by whay disadvantages they are automatically supjected to by living in the area with their current socioeconomic status

Resilience the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. This is a reveiw of what resources they hold and how they are currently dealing with the issues that they are facing