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Cutting across disciplines from science and technology studies to the arts and humanities, this thought-provoking collection engages with key issues of social exclusion, inequality, power and knowledge in the context of COVID-19.
The authors use the crisis as a lens to explore the contours of contemporary societies and lay bare the ways in which orthodox conceptions of the human condition can benefit a privileged few.
Highlighting the lived experiences of marginalised groups from around the world, this is a boundary spanning critical intervention to ongoing debates about the pandemic. It presents new ways of thinking in public policy, culture and the economy and points the way forward to a more equitable and inclusive human future.
This book centres on questions about being human that are raised by the current pandemic and addresses these through a series of short, accessible, and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries. The COVID-19 crisis poses massive challenges for citizens, businesses, policymakers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, while at the same time opening up new fissures and fractures in society. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning, and understanding of being human. These are at the core of this collection. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people, most notably members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, disabled, young, older, and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture, and daily life. Consideration of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-COVID-19 world. In addressing these critical issues this collection makes a valuable contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.
This book centres on questions about being human that are raised by the current pandemic and addresses these through a series of short, accessible, and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries. The COVID-19 crisis poses massive challenges for citizens, businesses, policymakers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, while at the same time opening up new fissures and fractures in society. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning, and understanding of being human. These are at the core of this collection. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people, most notably members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, disabled, young, older, and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture, and daily life. Consideration of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-COVID-19 world. In addressing these critical issues this collection makes a valuable contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, NICE produced a rapid guideline for managing critical care in adults that made frailty pivotal to assessments. This aimed ‘to maximise the safety of patients who need critical care … [and] enable services to make the best use of resources’ (NICE, 2020). Consequently, frailty became key to avoiding potentially harmful interventions and, implicitly, to rationing access to care. This chapter explores what frailty is, how it became a central construct for making care assessments during the pandemic, and the implications of this. We find multiple understandings of frailty, but at a policy level we suggest potential for large-scale discrimination.
The COVID-19 pandemic, in its first few months, gave rise to a momentary sense of solidarity across previously obdurate lines of class and nationality. This represented a destabilization of the prevailing hegemony of capitalist realism, best summed up in the Thatcherite mantra of There Is No Alternative (TINA). While that story of solidarity may have been brief, overstated and far from universal, it nonetheless demonstrated the possibility of the hegemony’s overturning – though it took the construction of an abstract and alien Other to conjure that class consciousness is a discomforting indication of TINA's discursive entrenchment. Nonetheless, the demonstrable possibility of overturning TINA in favour of TAMA (There Are Many Alternatives) is a silver lining to COVID’s cumulonimbus. Emerging techniques of futuring – social, participatory, situated, co-creative – offer the tools with which not one but many different possible futures might be narrated and shared. The pandemic saw millions, perhaps billions of people crying out for an alternative: social futuring proposes that the best way to sustain that demand is to democratize not ‘the future’ – which is always already an abstraction, a top-down technocratic narrative – but rather futurity itself.
Genome editing is a set of techniques in molecular biology that allow faster, more accurate modification of DNA. Genome editing tools allow scientists to make directed changes to the genes of any living organism, including plants, animals and humans. If applied as part of in vitro fertilization procedures in humans, it has the potential to create genetic changes that not only affect future children but can potentially be passed on to future generations as well. Once considered science fiction, this type of experiment was attempted in 2018 by Chinese scientist He Jiankui. COVID-19 has exposed how a range of existing structural inequalities from racial discrimination to poverty affect not only how people are affected by disease but also the extent to which they can benefit (or not) from scientific and technological responses to disease. Both the design and distribution of technologies have ethical and political consequences. This chapter reflects on how this politics of technology, which have been so brutally exposed by COVID-19, can inform how we discuss and govern inheritable human genome editing if it becomes available in future societies and offers some thoughts on what a fair and responsible application of genome editing might look like.
The UK is playing a world-leading role in the contemporary development of genomics – the decoding of our DNA – creating powerful technology platforms that may have profound consequences for the future of healthcare, civil liberties and personal identity. These developments have moved centre stage during the pandemic with the massive increase in gene sequencing for tracking coronavirus. This chapter will examine the social implications of the growing use of genomics technologies, and analyse how they are contributing to an important shift in how we understand health. This emphasizes the biological and individualized nature of disease in contrast to the social determinants of health and illness, supporting an increasingly biomedicalized understanding of the human.
This book centres on questions about being human that are raised by the current pandemic and addresses these through a series of short, accessible, and thought-provoking essays that range across disciplinary boundaries. The COVID-19 crisis poses massive challenges for citizens, businesses, policymakers and professionals around the globe. The pandemic has highlighted the deep divisions and inequalities that already existed, while at the same time opening up new fissures and fractures in society. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink many aspects of social, cultural, and economic life. Three key issues have emerged in this context that are fundamentally concerned with the experience, meaning, and understanding of being human. These are at the core of this collection. Firstly, the marginalization of many groups of people, most notably members of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities, disabled, young, older, and displaced people and how they are de/valued in the response to the virus. Secondly, the role of new scientific knowledge in these processes of inclusion and exclusion. Little attention has so far been paid to the central role of science in shaping our understanding and experience of the pandemic. Thirdly, the remaking and reordering of society as a result of the pandemic and the opening up of new futures for work, the environment, culture, and daily life. Consideration of how we might better make the future are still missing from public discussion of the post-COVID-19 world. In addressing these critical issues this collection makes a valuable contribution to one of the most pressing issues of our time.
This chapter explores the experience of disability, my blindness, and of ageing and I will show how scientific responses to COVID-19 have rendered their combination not only as a site of vulnerability, but also as a life barely worth living. I will explore how vision together with its sister, the virtual, have diminished touch. These explorations suggest that the already dominant voices of science and of vision are enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Science and vision have all but replaced any other ways of knowing in the West and, indeed, globally. They combine to render touch as both an inferior sense in relation to sight and as a sense (sight) of danger, of contagion. Finally, I will show how blindness and old age co-mingle and how science has used COVID-19 as the occasion to emphasize the diminished humanity of both
This chapter explores stem cell donor recruitment work and considers the challenges confronting these efforts during the pandemic, from event closures to distancing measures. Recruitment work locates potential donors for stem cell transplants which are used to treat blood malignancies like leukaemia. Racially minoritized patients are less likely to find a matching donor, in part because there are fewer racially minoritized donors registered. In-person recruitment events are seen to be particularly valuable for registering racially minoritized people who are recruited with less success through digital routes. However, during pandemic restrictions, recruitment has become increasingly reliant on digital channels. This chapter reflects on the potential consequences of in-person recruitment cessation for the effort to ensure life-extending treatment is available to all, regardless of their ethnicity.
