Colonialism and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Colonialism and the COVID-19 Pandemic PDF Author: Arthur W. Blume
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303092825X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
This book views responses to the Covid 19 virus through the lens of indigenous thinking which sheds light on some of the failures in dealing with the pandemic. Colonial societies maintain beliefs that hierarchies are part of the natural order, and that certain people are entitled to privileges that others are not. These hierarchies have contributed to racism as well as health, and wealth disparities that have increased vulnerabilities to the virus. Indigenous societies, on the other hand, view individuals as interdependent, and hold an optimistic view that this tragedy can yield important lessons for future improvement. This book examines the legacy of colonial societies in contributing to existing vulnerabilities, and incorporates an indigenous perspective in re-imagining the problem and its solutions.

Covid-19 in Palestine

Covid-19 in Palestine PDF Author: Nadia Naser-Najjab
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755651197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
Israel and Palestine were worlds apart during the pandemic that claimed over five million lives globally. While Palestinians were forced to adopt crude survival measures and endure economic privations, Israel was praised as a vaccination world leader. This book demonstrates how Israel utilized the pandemic to tighten surveillance and control over Palestine and the Palestinians. Drawing on theories of settler colonialism and the concept of 'necropolitics', the book is a vital testament to the reality of the Israeli settler colonial project today. The author uses case studies and interviews with Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, Hebron, Kufr Aqab and the Jalazoon refugee camp to understand the lived experiences of Palestinians. The newest colonial policies are discussed including how Israel activated a counter-terrorism database that could track citizens and ensure they adhered to lockdown regulations. It also shows how Israel destroyed Palestinian infrastructure essential for water, sanitation and hygiene, leaving Palestinians unable to fight the virus. The book shows that, for Palestinians, the pandemic was simply the latest in a long line of national catastrophes in a context where settler colonialism prevails.

Epidemics and Othering

Epidemics and Othering PDF Author: Heike Steinhoff
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839465052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of many people around the globe and has brought to the fore discussions about the ways in which relations of power have shaped human biology and the health of populations. Focusing on these biopolitics, this collection brings together a number of historical and cultural perspectives on processes of othering in the long transnational human history of epidemics and pandemics. Contributors explore the intertwinement of biopolitics and othering with regard to specific bodies, people, and places, in relation to COVID-19 and beyond, as they discuss othering dynamics in the context of post/colonialism and with reference to a number of different cultural, political, medical and media discourses.

Modernity and the Pandemic

Modernity and the Pandemic PDF Author: Sean Creaven
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100381817X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Modernity and the Pandemic: Decivilization, Imperialism, and COVID-19 applies the tools of critical social theory to make sense of the COVID-19 crisis and presents a critical sociological analysis of aspects of the political and community response to the pandemic. The book focuses on key themes integral to a sociology of pandemics in the ‘global’ age. Firstly, Creaven argues that cultures of individualism and consumerism, and of pervasive and deeply entrenched social inequalities (i.e. decivilization) significantly weaken the cause of public health by weakening the compliance of people with state-mandated non-pharmaceutical interventions (including and especially physical distancing rules) and encouraging vaccine hesitancy. Secondly, Creaven examines how interstate competition and imperial politics has undermined an effective global policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Policy failure with regard to the management of the pandemic is interpreted as being rooted in the dominance of neoliberal ideology and governance in the politics of international relations, particularly in the politics of the leading state actors, by protection of corporate interests at the expense of public health, and in the constraints imposed on state actors by the competitive dynamic of multinational capitalism in the ‘global’ age. Modernity and the Pandemic will appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences with interests in neoliberalism and its social, cultural and epidemiological impacts.

Epidemic Illusions

Epidemic Illusions PDF Author: Eugene T Richardson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262045605
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A physician-anthropologist explores how public health practices--from epidemiological modeling to outbreak containment--help perpetuate global inequities. In Epidemic Illusions, Eugene Richardson, a physician and an anthropologist, contends that public health practices--from epidemiological modeling and outbreak containment to Big Data and causal inference--play an essential role in perpetuating a range of global inequities. Drawing on postcolonial theory, medical anthropology, and critical science studies, Richardson demonstrates the ways in which the flagship discipline of epidemiology has been shaped by the colonial, racist, and patriarchal system that had its inception in 1492. Deploying a range of rhetorical tools and drawing on his clinical work in a variety of epidemics, including Ebola in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, leishmania in the Sudan, HIV/TB in southern Africa, diphtheria in Bangladesh, and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, Richardson concludes that the biggest epidemic we currently face is an epidemic of illusions—one that is propagated by the coloniality of knowledge production.

On Medicine as Colonialism

On Medicine as Colonialism PDF Author: Michael Fine
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 162963994X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In this strident, necessary, meticulously researched book Michael Fine uses the COVID-19 pandemic and many other examples to show the costly failure of the American health care system in bold relief. Hospitals, insurance companies, Big Pharma, specialists, and even primary care doctors have all become tools of the new health profiteers. On Medicine as Colonialism shows how the American health care system cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world. Focusing on how health care profiteers co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid to extract resources from communities, this book reveals how medicine and health care have become tools of a new health colonialism, turning medicine on its head, so that individuals and communities lose their agency, health becomes impossible, and profits are used to dismantle democracy itself.

Mobility and Globalization in the Aftermath of COVID-19

Mobility and Globalization in the Aftermath of COVID-19 PDF Author: Maximiliano E. Korstanje
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030788458
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This book argues that COVID-19 revives a much deeper climate of terror which was instilled by terrorism and the War on Terror originally declared by Bush's administration in 2001. It discusses critically not only the consequences of COVID-19 on our daily lives but also “the end of hospitality”, at least as we know it. Since COVID-19 started spreading across the globe, it affected not only the tourism industry but also ground global trade to a halt. Governments adopted restrictive measures to stop the spread of the virus, including the closure of borders, and airspace, the introduction of strict lockdowns and social distancing, much of which led to large-scale cancellations of international and domestic flights. This book explores how global tourists, who were largely considered ambassadors of democratic and prosperous societies in the pre-pandemic days, have suddenly become undesired guests.

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities

Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities PDF Author: Om Prakash Dwivedi
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040119522
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.

Viral Loads

Viral Loads PDF Author: Lenore Manderson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1800080239
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world.

Racism, Capitalism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Racism, Capitalism, and the COVID-19 Pandemic PDF Author: Zophia Edwards
Publisher: Daraja Press
ISBN: 9781990263316
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural problems affecting nonwhite racialized workers in the core and periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, are race neutral or willfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global inequalities. This pamphlet explains how the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other nonwhite racialized labor in the core and the periphery persisted throughout the COVID-19 crisis through the lens of Black radical scholarship on racism and capitalism. Edwards not only captures how people of African descent have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, but also the historical, sociological and structural roots of the inequalities that affect vulnerable groups across the world, tied to what she has described as the architecture of the global economy linked to race and gender. She represents a refreshing voice in our time and part of a Caribbean radical tradition in the spirit of Claudia Jones, Eric Williams, Oliver C. Cox, and C.L.R. James, from her native Trinidad, as well as Guyana's Walter Rodney and Andaiye.