Epidemic Elements and Impacts
Six elements of epidemics/pandemics
What are:
Human beings
Germs and viruses
Non-Human Animals
Space and Proximity (Geographies of Illness)
Time
Immunity (and Vaccination)
The outbreak narrative (Wald 2008)
What is:
Human interdependence and connection as both potentially destructive and lifesaving.
Contagion as intrigue, anxiety, and hope about social and spatial changes brought about by modernity and its modalities.
Scapegoating of already marginalized people.
Recurring story of the romanticizing of destruction and endurance, repeatedly reenacted.
Circulation and reproduced, reconstituted
Figure of the superspreader (individual vs. group, responsibility)
Difference between "misinformation" and "disinformation"
What is malevolence. Misinformation is inaccurate information without an agenda or malevolence, whereas disinformation is purposeful and malevolent inaccurate information, typically with an agenda.
Intersectionality
What is:
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins defines intersectionality as
"the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities."
Critical legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coining of the term “intersectionality” in 1989 (and 1991). ”Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It is the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination and privilege.”
Disaster capitalism
What is:
Refers to the tendency of corporations, investors, and governments to respond opportunistically to catastrophic events, and pass legislation or other politically controversial and predatory practices that would otherwise be difficult or socially unacceptable to allow.
This phenomenon of extreme capitalism has troubling implications, especially when it comes to climate change, war, and conflict.
Otherwise known as "the shock doctrine."
Elemental impacts of Epidemics/Pandemics
What are:
Environmental degradation and extraction
Poor social and material infrastructure
Moralizing language and narratives
Profit-based motivations
Pseudo-science and bioethical failures
Consequences of outbreak narrative
What are (or can be):
Social bonds
Institutional and state authority
Epidemiology, and thus epidemics, as a measurable science
The lack of containment with some pan/epidemics brings about new anxieties that circumstances are not exactly measurable or certain.
Outbreak narratives are then dynamic and tied to the social, historical, political, economic, ecological, and biological.
New vs. old epidemics are crucial here too (to whom?)
Moral panic
Common myths about vaccines
What are:
Causes autism
Implants microchip into body
Spreads HIV
Doesn't help or is not necessary to combat infectious diseases
The sick role
Parsons' social functionalist theory of the sick role as a sanctioned deviant/unproductive role in society, with the idea that the person will return to productivity. When someone's sick role becomes chronic or permanent, it ceases to be a sanctioned or accepted deviant role and becomes deviant and punishable.
Coronavirus capitalism
What is:
Form of disaster capitalism in Covid times:
Conspiracies and misinformation becoming viral is a newer thing with Covid-19 and disaster capitalism (Naomi Klein)
•Anti-vax and anti-mask views used against public education (vouchers, private and charter schools)
•Using misinformation about the pandemic, on top of the state of emergency
•If nothing is true, then anything is possible
•Whole new shock doctrine!
•Also "Catastrophe Capitalism" by Dr. Intan Suwandi and Dr. John Bellamy Foster regarding epidemiology and Covid-19.
•Corporate agribusiness, deforestation, ecosystem destruction,
•Climate change,
•Zoonosis, Spillover
•Medical Industrial Complex (MIC)
•Suwandi not only contends that capitalism is an accomplice in some major natural disasters, but she’s also found that capitalism benefits from catastrophes and intensifies “imperial value,” the centuries-long domination of the Global North over the Global South.
Additional significant factors?
What are (or can be):
Governmental policies that reflect or reinforce some or all of these factors.
Structural violence is present everywhere and presents in multifaceted ways.
Panic, fear, and distrust based on something that does or appears to challenge societal norms, values, and morals.
It often results in further stigmatization of already marginalized groups of people.
Give an example of biomediatization
One example:
Coproduction of health information by the media and medical professionals
Media information regarding best masks for Covid-19 prevention
Differences between illness, sickness, and disease. Give an example from the class.
What are:
Illness: Experience of symptoms and the response to them by laypersons and their networks/communities.
Disease: The reinterpretation of symptoms as pathophysiology as understood from the clinical practitioner's framework.
Sickness: Symptoms and pathology understood at the population level in the broadest societal context.
Connection of pollution, deforestation, and viral spillover to legacies of colonialism and imperialism?
What are/can be:
Profit and exponential growth over health and rights of people and planet
Extraction/extractivist politics (like plantations, mines, extraction of labor too; threshold theory of pollution)
Disconnection of humanity from other animals/land/water/environment
Disaster capitalism
Sphere of biocommunicability
What is:
Biocommunicability refers to both bottom-up and top-down models of knowledge and narrative (re)production and circulation regarding biomedicine.
Spheres of biocommunicability are circuits of knowledge and narratives where biocommunicabitliy occurs.
Explain the social significance of the criminalization of HIV.
What are:
Superspreader + superpredator
Criminalization of race/ethnicity, class/poverty, sexuality, gender
Intersection of public health and law enforcement
Concerning precedent of criminalization of infectious disease transmission