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The Entangled Emergencies of COVID-19
Abstract
City of Chicago officials adopted a “racial equity” approach to mitigate the disproportionate racial impact of COVID-19, yet according to interviews with racially and socioeconomically marginalized Chicagoans, this approach failed to address core vulnerabilities associated with health, housing, mental health, and welfare. This article argues that COVID-19 represents and reifies the convergence of three sets of emergencies. First, federal and local governments governed through emergency, enacting temporally bounded governmental strategies that presumed scarcity, triaged care, and naturalized structural inequality by delinking the effects of racism from its causes. This response was spectacular and anticipatory—designed to safeguard the status quo until “normalcy” could be restored. This approach exacerbated two existing endemic emergencies: (1) the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to neoliberal restructuring and fragmented care infrastructure and (2) the sacrifice of lower-income frontline workers to premature death to safeguard the economy and protect the middle class.
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The city government of Chicago adopted a ‘racial equity’ approach to tackle racial disparities in COVID‐19 outcomes. Drawing on experience addressing core vulnerabilities associated with HIV risk, Chicago public health experts who designed COVID‐19 mitigation initiatives recognised that the same social determinants of health drive racial disparities for both HIV and COVID‐19. Yet, when building an infrastructure to respond to COVID‐19, disease surveillance and data collection became the priority for investment ahead of other forms of public health work or the provision of social services. The building of a disease surveillance infrastructure that responded to and supplied data took precedence over addressing social determinants of poor health. Community‐based organisations that might have otherwise organised for social service provision were incorporated into this infrastructure. Further, public health officials often failed to heed the lessons learned from their experience with HIV vulnerability. Based on qualitative analysis of 56 interviews with public health experts and policymakers in Chicago, we argue that the prioritisation of disease surveillance, coupled with a scarcity model of public health provision, undermined the city’s attempt to redress racial inequities in outcomes. We argue that the economisation of pandemic response exacerbates health disparities, even when racial equity frameworks are adopted.
We examine trends in employment, earnings and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The US safety net is a patchwork of different programmes providing in‐kind as well as cash benefits, and it had many holes prior to the pandemic. In addition, few of the programmes are designed explicitly as automatic stabilisers. We show that the safety net response to employment losses in the COVID‐19 pandemic largely consists only of increased support from unemployment insurance and food assistance programmes, an inadequate response compared with the magnitude of the downturn. We discuss options to reform social assistance in the United States to provide more robust income floors in times of economic downturns.
Social theory is developing in response to the coronavirus (COVID) crisis. Fundamental questions about social justice in the relationship of individuals to society are raised by Delanty in his review of political philosophy, including Agamben, Foucault and Žižek. However, the focus on the libertarian critique of authoritarianism is not enough. The social democratic critique of neoliberalism lies at the centre of the contesting responses to the COVID crisis. A social democratic perspective on public health, democracy and state action is contrasted with the anti-statists of left and right. This is addressed in debates on the relationship between science and governance, the place of crisis in theories of change and the conceptualisation of alternative forms of social formation. The crisis initiated by the pandemic, cascading through society, from health to economy, to polity and into violence, includes a contestation between social democratic and neoliberal visions of alternative forms of society.
How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define ‘slow emergencies’ as situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; d) emergency claims. We conclude with a call to reclaim ‘emergency’.
Direct democracy by citizen initiatives is often heralded as the avenue for the true will of the people to be heard. While scholars have debated whether this leads to a form of Madison's ''tyranny of the majority,'' the debate over the concrete impact of such initiatives on racially margin-alized groups remains unsettled. We examine a different question about racially marginalized groups' interests in this process: the symbolic assertion of white supremacy expressed through this mechanism of majority will. We develop the concept of ''racial spectacles'' to describe the narrative vehicles that serve to symbolically reassert and reinforce real existing racial hierarchies and inequalities. We explore the creation of these spectacles through the initiative process because it is a state-sanctioned vehicle that enables white dominance. Paradoxically, these campaigns that purport to be colorblind depend on the enactment of these racial spectacles. Through an analysis of five statewide anti-affirmative action initiative campaigns from 1996 to 2008, we explore both macro and micro political dynamics: public displays of these campaigns as well as individual, private agency expressed in the public and private act of
So far as it limits productive uses of time, waiting generates distinct social and personal costs. The purpose of this paper is to explore the way these costs are distributed throughout a social structure and to identify the principles to which this allocation gives expression. The main proposition of our analysis is that the distribution of waiting time coincides with the distribution of power. This proposition is based on the assumption that an individual's power reflects the scarcity of the goods or skills he possesses; accordingly, the relationship between a server and client may be characterized in terms of organized dependency, for which waiting (under certain conditions) provides an accurate index. However, if delay is related to the client's position in a power network, then he may show deference to a server by an expressed willingness to wait, or a server may confirm or enhance his own status by deliberately causing him to wait. Secondary interactional modes thus come to subserve a relationship originally grounded in a supply-demand structure. The broader implications of this correlation allow us to characterize stratification systems in terms of the apportionment of time as well as the distribution of other kinds of resources.
As meatpacking facilities became COVID-19 hotspots, the pandemic renewed the importance of longstanding claims from environmental justice and agrifood scholars. The former asserts the perceived dispensability of marginalized populations sustains environmental injustices, whereas the latter stresses that decades of industrial consolidation created structural instability in the food supply chain. This article asks how industry and government leverage existing socio-ecological inequalities to ensure the continuity of the meatpacking supply chain during COVID-19, and the implications these actions hold for workers. To answer these questions, the authors perform case studies of meatpacking facilities in three Midwestern states. This article uses the critical environmental justice framework to expand research on sacrifice zones to include hazardous worksites such as meatpacking. We find that toxic employment flourishes through firms labor practices that pass socio-ecological risks onto workers in the name of efficiency, and through a complicit state that prioritizes accumulation and consumption over workers health.
This essay explores how epidemics in the past and present give rise to distinctive, recurring racial scripts about bodies and identities, with sweeping racial effects beyond the Black experience. Using examples from cholera, influenza, tuberculosis, AIDS, and COVID-19, the essay provides a dramaturgical analysis of race and epidemics in four acts, moving from Act I, racial revelation; to Act II, the staging of bodies and places; to Act III, where race and disease is made into spectacle; and finally, Act IV, in which racial boundaries are fixed, repaired, or made anew in the response to the racial dynamics revealed by epidemics. Focusing primarily on North America but touching on global racial narratives, the essay concludes with reflections on the writers and producers of these racialized dramas, and a discussion of why these racialized repertoires have endured.
Emergency as a descriptor, technique and legal-political device has become a taken-for-granted way of apprehending and governing events and situations. In this paper, I explore the temporality of emergency, through reflections on the use of declarations of emergency in relation to US-based Black Lives Matter protests. I do so in the context of claims and counter-claims about contemporary transformations in what Rheinhart Kosselleck (2004: 241) terms the ‘expected otherness of the future’. Arguing for changes in the form of the ‘expected otherness of the future’ rather than its simple loss, disappearance or absence, I describe how emergency operates around a temporality of exceptionality, urgency and interval. Formal and informal declarations of emergency are, in addition, imbued with hope: the hope that time remains and action can make a difference to events. What the use of declarations of emergency by Black Lives Matter activists does is disrupt the geo-historically specific divide between the everyday and emergency by naming conditions that mix the endemic and the evental as emergencies. In the spark of hope that is the act of declaring that ongoing conditions should be treated as emergencies, the ‘otherness of the future’ folds into and becomes part of the present.
This article addresses biomedical forms of racial targeting under neoliberal biopolitics. We explore two racial targeting technologies: The development of race-based pharmaceuticals, specifically BiDil; and medical hot spotting, a practice that uses Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies and spatial profiling to identify populations that are medically vulnerable in order to facilitate preemptive care. These technologies are ostensibly deployed under neoliberal biopolitics and the governance of health to affirm life. We argue, however, that these efforts further subject racial minorities—and specifically black subjects—to the cost–benefit logics of neoliberalism in the U.S. health care system and enduring anti-blackness. What is called for is an abolitionist biomedicine that recognizes and seeks to challenge the multifarious ways that race is ontologized as a corporeal and/or spatial truth while attending to the very real embodied effects of structural racism.
Patients of the State is a sociological account of the extended waiting that poor people seeking state social and administrative services must endure. It is based on ethnographic research in the waiting area of the main welfare office in Buenos Aires, in the line leading into the Argentine registration office where legal aliens apply for identification cards, and among people who live in a polluted shantytown on the capital's outskirts, while waiting to be allocated better housing. Scrutinizing the mundane interactions between the poor and the state, as well as underprivileged people's confusion and uncertainty about the administrative processes that affect them, Javier Auyero argues that while waiting, the poor learn the opposite of citizenship. They learn to be patients of the state. They absorb the message that they should be patient and keep waiting, because there is nothing else that they can do. Drawing attention to a significant everyday dynamic that has received little scholarly attention until now, Auyero considers not only how the poor experience these lengthy waits but also how making poor people wait works as a strategy of state control.
This article offers a theoretical and methodological system for a sociological analysis of the restless nature of historical events. This system, political semiosis, is able to identify and assess the performative speech acts, the demonstrative orientational specifications, and the mimetic representations required to advance historical transformations. The features of political semiosis structure the flow of historical events by managing the specific media and generic forms that are the vehicles through which events take shape. Political semiosis provides a method for analyzing both the circulation and the materialization of events. The exemplary case of September 11 illuminates this approach's capabilities.
This paper explores the implications of mass HIV treatment programmes in Africa, particularly when non-governmental organizations, American universities or European hospitals, directly govern the lives of populations (such as those living with HIV) and in fact have power of life or death over them. It explores a novel form of legitimate, therapeutic domination that results from framing the epidemic as a humanitarian emergency. That lives be saved requires enrolment: that a standardized population be called into being so that it may then be targeted, relying on the deployment of biological and political technologies for constituting populations and transforming bodies and subjectivities. These transformations that seek to direct consciousness and change bodily practice are governmentalities exceptionally directed at the biological existence of those living with or potentially at risk for HIV. And, in an inversion of the classical model whereby evidence of efficacy permits intervention, in this case intervention drives the need for self-validating evidence (that is, the intervention was effective). The conjugation of these standardized humanitarian problems and populations with the production of post-facto, self-validating knowledge (most often described as `lessons learned' or `best practices') is an `experimentality' that leverages the deployment of these interventions across the globe.Social Theory & Health (2009) 7, 196-217. doi:10.1057/sth.2009.12
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