Trusting touch during Covid-19
Performing Medicine’s Bella Eacott examines some of the norms around the use of touch in healthcare settings, and considers how these have been altered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Touch is central to healthcare practice:
‘Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Public Health’ Book Review
How is epidemiology shaped by the political structures of class, race and colonial power? Consequently, how might public health practices perpetuate global inequities? Steven Wilson reviews Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Public Health (The MIT
Reading Banner’s Communicative Biocapitalism in the Time of Covid-19
What happens to the ‘patient’s voice’ when it participates in the creation of biocapital via digital health platforms? What is the significance of Olivia Banner’s concept of ‘communicative biocapitalism’ in the era of the Covid-19
Postapocalyptic Peoples? Covid-19, Public Health, and Native Americans
In this post, Anna Kemball reflects on the framing of Native Americans as ‘postapocalyptic’ people in the context of Coronavirus. She discusses the missing public health data on Native American rates of Covid-19 amidst
Listening to the Silence: On Reading Blu’s Hanging During a Pandemic
Reading Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s novel Blu’s Hanging during lockdown, Julia Brown considers the significance of silence during a pandemic.
I Want to Zoom with the Baby in My Womb: Pregnancy During the Pandemic
In this personal essay Cleo Hanaway-Oakley reflects on being pregnant during the pandemic and the importance of ultrasound scan imagery.
Publics, pandemics, and the performance of ethical review
The Animal Research Nexus project developed an immersive performance for engaging publics with the ethics of animal research around an emerging disease. Bentley Crudgington talks to Gail Davies about happens when the staged event becomes a global emergency.
Why Didn’t We See the Coronavirus Pandemic Coming?
A question of scale: Bettina Bildhauer argues that viruses are too small to be recognised in our anthropocentric habits of perceiving agency, but “new materialist” theories and pre-Enlightenment writing can help us challenge these