It’s a Ramadhan morning in the port city of Mombasa, early April 2023. I’m standing behind an audience of about 100 people who have turned up to a makeshift stage on the edge of the neighbourhood of Old Town. A performance of Lisemwalo Lipo: A play about vaccine rumours is in full swing.
Why should the figure of the middleman matter for scholars of global health? The short answer is: they are impossible to avoid. The long answer is as follows: Throughout the twenty-first century, claims have circulated that the global pharmaceutical supply chain is awash with fakes, and these claims sparked our curiosity. For nearly a decade, […]
A workshop report of Symbiotic Viruses, convened by Benjamin Hegarty and Frédéric Keck, and held at the Collège de France and Paris Institute for Advanced Study, 4-5 March 2025 1. The virology of history The idea that viruses might be addressed as potential allies in human health is a tantalising yet troubling prospect. In the aftermath […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). We decided to put together Romani Chronicles of COVID-19 during the Great Quarantine of 2020 (Boellstorff, 2020) when, like so many others, we were overwhelmed by the […]
Part of a series discussing Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience, edited by Paloma Gay y Blasco and Martin Fotta (Berghahn: New York and Oxford, 2023). As I sit down to write these words in Glasgow, Scotland, in July 2024, the news is still dominated by the enduring spectre of COVID-19. The UK […]
