Analyze

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.  

One week before the national lockdown, the Ministry of Health ordered the cancellation of any massive events with more than 50 people, cancelling classes in Universities and schools, and avoiding flights from countries with high rates of virus.

Source link (here)

https://www.datos.gov.co/Salud-y-Protecci-n-Social/Casos-positivos-de-COVID-19-en-Colombia/gt2j-8ykr/data

This is the online open data about the evolution of COVID-19 displayed by the National Health Institute INS (Instituto Nacional de Salud) from Colombia.

1. The INS publishes this data after gathering results from the rest of the country.
2. This informations supports government´s decisions on quarantine, projections and bringing normal life back.
3. The INS has criticized the results of tests received from some regions. They argue that they are not well handled and they must not to be reconfirmed.

An ethnographic moment that stands out to me is when a yearly visitor to the Grand Staircaise Escalante region emphasized the importance of preserving the area under monument status. In a rare moment of recognizing the energy use/demands of even those who are preservation/wilderness proponents, he said "look, I know we have to get our energy from somewhere and maybe for now it's going to be fossil fuels, but please, not here. This place is sacred." Although everyday energy use and the use of petroleum to make such outdoor recreation products as kayaks is occasionally brought into view instead of displaced, these comments are often divorsed from thinking about how people in this area get energy, where the materials extracted from this area go, and what other forms of energy production might replace this extraction. Rather than arguing for a transition of how energy is produced, there seems to be a sense of inevitabilty of extraction but a desire for such industrial processes to be carried out somewhere else.