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When the first lockdown orders were passed in India and stay-at-home orders in California, many in my family dispersed across nations felt containment for the first time. An old couple had arrived to the US in December last year and could not leave now. I had planned to spend summer in Delhi with my family but that is not going to happen. It is too risky to be mobile. At the same time, our lives under lockdown are dependent on people being productive, at home or beyond. When I think about theorizing place and COVID19, I must take containment seriously. The moment reveals the inadequacy of concepts as containers, making the discursive gaps apparent (Fortun 2012) but leaving us flailing about as we meet each other, fingers-crossed. 

The clearest inadequacy is methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Schiller 2002): even as lockdowns have visibly occured across national borders, the transmission of virus through arteries of transnational industrial capitalism (some of it late, some not) and the privilege of transnational mobility point that as long as these infrastructures remain in place, so will this virus and more such to come. We continue to order things online, and Amazon continues to maintain these infrastructures. Public spaces are gradually opening with questionable safety norms in place. India, like other countries, is rescuing its citizens and bringing them back home, even as it continues to let migrant workers starve. 

There is consensus that things will not be as before, even as transnational mobilities continue to function. With enough PPE, fingers-crossed, everyone will be fine. What does it mean to take containment seriously, at a time when we are opening up? As things will continue to be normalized to our collective surprise and fatigue, this moment should mobilize us to think about different ways of organizing and care. These do not have to be new ways of thinking and doing but those that have blossomed in our lands for some time. 

In my annotation, I offer brief summaries of articles that animate my thinking about theorizing from confinement and that offer ways of doing already present: 

• Epidemics in American Concentration Camps: From the “White Plague” to COVID-19: Japanese Americans have formed the group Tsuru for Solidarity, calling for decarceration from prisons, jails, and detention centers. As these violent confined places become hotspots of infection, residents and descendants of residents of World War II concentration camps located across the US (most famously in Manzanar, California) recall accounts of epidemic management. Not surprisingly, the burden to remain healthy and disease-free was on detainees, which meant aggregating community and family resources when detainees were already deprived of livelihoods. As staffing problems arose during tuberculosis epidemic in 1940s, the hospital management even considered family members to take hospital shifts. 

• By Desperate Measures Relieved?: Public Health, Prisons, and the Politics of Life: Jason Ludwing writes about how notions of accelerating vaccine development for COVID19 through human "challenge trials" reminds him of medical experiments on incarcerated people in the US. Challenge trials depend on a volunteering body to take on the infection, but for people in prisons, the line blurs between a consenting body that volunteers and a coerced body that is sacrificed. He points to the prison-university complex  in collaboration between University of Maryland and Maryland Corrections in typhoid experiments based at Prison Volunteer Research Unit (PVRU) which launched many publications and research careers. The researchers frame those as ethical experiments because the male inmates received better accomodation and pay. Even though incarcerated populations will not be experimented upon during COVID, prison factories have remained open for producing PPE. Ludwig reminds us that this is not because of the moment, but an inevitable consequence of a system that deprives people of their bodies. 

• COVID-19, Biopolitics and Abolitionist Care Beyond Security and Containment: Eva Boodman argues that we must see beyond individual protection against microbes (biodefense) especially when it comes to people confined by coercion. Building from Foucault's biopolitics (make live/let die), Boodman sees this as continuation, not departure from what many groups have known all along: that the state and university is not for them. They know that we will keep getting messages of management and security as care. Boodman has a vision for abolitionist care, arguing that abolitionists over the years have assidously foregrounded racialized and class-ed neglect that COVID exacerbates and called for its end rather than thinking with. Abolitionist vision would mean calling an end for prisons, jails and all forms of carceration and in line with neglect of public health, an end to all for-profit nursing homes and treatment centers. It means to center mutual aid groups that have been working on-ground for a long time, and those that are built anew. It would mean for both to learn from each other. But mutual aid groups will also be careful to not be co-opted (as Black Panther Party's free breakfast program was co-opted by USDA), or serve as justification for further state neglect. Abolitionist care acknowledges that it will have to work temporarily with security apparatuses even as it continues to resist from inside. The end goal is not to settle for a liberal future.

• Beyond Inside/Outside: Imagining Safety During Covid-19: Author mobilizes her experience of leaving domestic abuse to think about living and working in confined domestic spaces. Feminized labor blurs inside/outside boundaries, revealed starkly by COVID. It is fatigued and exhausted but carries on. She says: "My experience of abuse was organized around waiting. Waiting for something bad to happen and then waiting for the bad thing to be over”. She says that the years of abuse live in her body. She was afraid to call for mediation because the police and state have worked to either criminalize or pass judgement on people like her. The work of transformative justice and prison abolition made her ask the question: why must we endure? Even though staying can be strategic, a way of survival, community can be elusive too. She offers the notion of "pod-building": does away with romantic ideas of community predicated upon shared identities and political analysis and pushes us to rely on relationship-building and trust with people we already know: that are reliable, have good boundaries and skills, which do not necessarily mirror our politics. This reconfiguration of care comes as she recognizes the link between intimate partner violence, gender-based violence, and prison-industrial complex that disrupted her healing and now animate her activism. 

• Working During COVID-19: Occupational Hazards and Workers’ Right to a Safe Workplace: A brief history of labor organizing around occupational safety and hazards and the role of ILO. To be recognized as occupational hazard, a worker in the American context must demonstrate that disease was contracted in place of work. For mining industry, the struggle to include silicosis and lung-based infections went on for decades and was successful but still requires heavy bureaucratic lifting. For petrochemical industries, this is even difficult as communities live in contamination, blurring home and work places. Workers in informal economy are even more precarious and face either starvation or contagion. As the ILO called for COVID to be recognized as a workplace hazard, could workers demand better conditions and from whom and how? The authors offer two examples from "occupied" factories, or those controlled by workers' assemblies: Rimaflow from Milan (Italy) and Traful Newen in Neuquen (Argentina). These workplaces implemented safety protocols much earlier than ordered by the state, and allowed older people, people with co-morbidity, and those who have domestic emergencies to stay at home with pay. Rather than decreasing production, these workplaces have seen an increase and created more jobs in a more ethical way.  

More reading: Care not Cages! #COVID19DecarcerateSyllabus

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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?

The IAEA is an international organization that seeks to promote the peaceful use of atomic technology and serve as an international regulator to promote safety and eliminate proliferation of nuclear weapon technology. According to the IAEA’s mission statement: “The International Atomic Energy Agency:  is an independent intergovernmental, science and technology-based organization, in the United Nations family, that serves as the global focal point for nuclear cooperation; assists its Member States, in the context of social and economic goals, in planning for and using nuclear science and technology for various peaceful purposes, including the generation of electricity, and facilitates the transfer of such technology and knowledge in a sustainable manner to developing Member States; develops nuclear safety standards and, based on these standards, promotes the achievement and maintenance of high levels of safety in applications of nuclear energy, as well as the protection of human health and the environment against ionizing radiation; verifies through its inspection system that States comply with their commitments, under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and other non-proliferation agreements, to use nuclear material and facilities only for peaceful purposes.” (iaea.org)

The membership of the IAEA consists of 168 countries as of February 2016. Membership includes all major countries and every nuclear power other than North Korea. To become a member state, a country must submit an application which is then reviewed by the IAEA Board of Governors who determine if the applying country is willing and able to uphold the charter. Then the general conference must approve the application and grant the state membership. It is important to know that a country does not need to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to be a member of the IAEA. Currently India, Israel, Pakistan, and the South Sudan have not signed and North Korea is withdrawn. (iaea.org)

 The mission of the IAEA is to promote and help the development of peaceful nuclear technologies and promote safety standards as well as inspect compliance to the commitments to non-proliferation treaties. (iaea.org)

                The IAEA has worked with Iran to complete seven projects and has another nine in the works for development of nuclear power, spent fuel processing, radiopharmaceuticals, heavy water, and security projects. (en.mehrnews.com/)

                The IAEA just held a conference in Manila to assist the Philippines in determining whether or not to revive its mothballed nuclear power plant, under the larger umbrella of the future of nuclear in the Asia-Pacific. (bworldonline.com)

                The agency also responded to the Fukushima incident. During the incident, they assisted Japan by analyzing a plethora of data and sending recommendation and results of their work. Over the last 5 years, the IAEA has sent ten expert missions and will assist in decommissioning the plant. Meanwhile, the IAEA is helping with monitoring leak/contamination management and managing radioactive waste. They are furthering first response efforts by hosting drills to better train and equip first responders for nuclear disasters. (iaea.org)

The IAEA’s approach is to be a friend of the countries and nuclear partners of those countries which hold IAEA membership. One of the IAEA’s missions is to promote nuclear power while on the other hand its other mission is to promote safety and check adherence to the nuclear treaties, agreements, and standards.