Figure 1: Non-safe-injection site behind Paris’ Gare du Nord, February 2016 (all photos by author).The first time I ever saw a person shooting up was right behind Paris’s Gare du Nord railway station in 2015. He was crouched in front of the low concrete wall in the picture (Figure 1). I had met André[1] when I volunteered at …
Amidst almost unstoppable contagion, many have hung their hopes on heat and humidity as a potential defence against contracting Covid-19. In the early months of the pandemic studies of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus is transmitted less efficiently in higher temperatures or at higher rates of humidity, leading to encouraging newspaper headlines around the world, from London to Jakarta. …
The COVID city: Class, physical isolation, and virtual connection
At the time of writing this we are all experiencing what the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim would call a “social fact” — something that cuts across all individuals and exerts social control on each of us. Today this solidarity-in-separation encompasses almost the whole world (Davies 2019). We are also enduring a …
The balcony has become a powerful domestic space symbolizing corona-solidarity in the south of Europe. Movie clips of Italians singing their national anthem from their balconies were broadcast worldwide in the evening news. Such a moving and spontaneous event united people quarantined. Italians, too, killed time making and hanging hand-crafted signs from their balconies with the phrase ‘Andrà tutto bene’—everything …
The metabolic rift
“All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil,” Marx (1976: 637-38) wrote in Volume I of Capital. For Marx, not only was the capitalist mode of production incapable of valuing nature in its own right, but its central contradictions also left it …