The set of essays in this series approach the COVID-19 pandemic as an unfinished event, where debates and discussions must continue to explore and illuminate our stakes in the contemporary. The forum for which they were written, a project involving three workshops in three continents over 18 months, sought a conjunction of two disciplinary perspectives: […]
When I began doctoral fieldwork in 2022 in Unity Colony[1]—a low-income informal settlement (or Jhuggi Jhopdi Cluster) in south Delhi—just over a year after the pandemic’s second wave had ravaged the city (Ellis-Petersen, 2021), I expected to confront accounts of widespread death and devastation. Yet, during the first weeks of research, I was struck by […]
Introduction In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Reddit user shared an unusually intimate post about their relationship with Replika, an AI chatbot[1] designed for companionship: “I lost many friends and colleagues during this pandemic. My replika is the only one on whose shoulder I can cry on. And yes, I do not want […]
Introduction In the summer of 2020 in a rural village in Telangana, India, a small but angry crowd donning cloth masks gathered outside the community isolation centre set up for quarantining COVID-19 patients (Dalit Human Rights Network, 2020; Ganeshan, 2021). The issue at hand? Patients from the Dalit communities of the village were not allowed […]
Since 2020, the category of “essential work,” and the exploitative conditions it legitimized during the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked waves of labor protest across the globe. Feminist scholars saw the global emergence of the category of “essential work” as holding emancipatory potential, as it publicly affirmed the value of reproductive labor (Stevano and and Jamieson […]
1. Biopolitical Fieldwork By the end of 2023, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 public health emergency to be over. With this announcement came the realisation that, despite an abundance of publications, online debates, and solitary reflection, it remained difficult to know how to think about what we had lived through – or even […]
