For our lesson, our group is exploring pandemics and how they affect our world, lives, etc. Please read Wald_Contagious.pdf (2007) and re-read Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’ | Free to read (2020) by our class on Monday (11/09) at 4:20p.m. Also, if your schedule permits please respond to the following discussion prompt on this blog post:
– How has/is our current pandemic affecting you, your family, the area you live, other groups of people, the U.S., or the world as a whole? Feel free to be as personal as you’d like (remember this is a public site) or as broad as you’d like. Try to connect this response in some way to the required readings.
As a reminder, we would love for you all to participate in answering this question, however, we are all only human and if you are unable to get a chance to post, please have the required readings completed for our class lesson.
Thank you all so much and we look forward to discussing pandemics with you all!
– Skylar, Jess, and Gabby
Thank you for this reading / lesson facilitation. The Ward text has been an eye-opening read, and I admit that it’s been quite difficult for me to get through because of how close the descriptions of SARS mirror the dialogue around the pandemic today. I am not quite sure how to structure this response, so forgive me if it feels more like a stream of consciousness than a structured response.
I admit that I’m beginning to become annoyed with the idea of the pandemic as progress for social justice, as Roy argues in her essay. While I understand the motivations and idea behind “the pandemic as a portal,” this idea of pandemics / disasters as a reason for optimism strikes me as a coping mechanism rather than a true and rigorous intellectual argument. Interestingly, I know many people who have found the pandemic to be unexpectedly providential for their careers: for example, my sister’s entire industry (museums) has totally collapsed, and her layoff offered her a path out of her previous dead-end job and into a start of a new career in digital marketing, as well as significant creative output. She began writing, a hobby that she had stopped after college, and is now looking at MFA programs. With that being said, however, the idea of the pandemic as a new opportunity for her is based on privilege: her middle-class job gave her a generous severance, she was able to stay at home during the worst of the pandemic and avoid getting ill, and she was able to get a new job quickly because of her strong professional networks and connections. For most people who were already in a precarious social or economic situation (the working class, people of color, etc) the pandemic has only brought more suffering: disproportionate infection and death rates, further economic instability, and the insult of being hailed as “heroes” while being denied basic economic support (like a second stimulus) or PPE. Honestly, I think the idea of the pandemic as “rejuvenation” is one that is based on a position of privilege, and a position that can be quite alienating to those who have suffered the loss of loved ones or livelihood. I understand why it is appealing–without this idea, there is less hope, less order–but I think it is ultimately a fallacy. While the pandemic probably will have a positive net social effect, I think if we look at it as such, it emphasizes the reality that in times of crisis, those on the top often profit while those on the bottom suffer more. We are all in the same waters, but some of us are in yachts, some of us are on islands, and many of us are drowning. The pandemic can’t be a portal if you don’t survive.
With that being said, I most intrigued reading Ward’s piece about her idea that, as Freud explores with the example of Sophocles’s Oedipus and unwitting superspreaders, “unwitting transmission of a taboo does not mitigate guilt.” Much of our discussion about race in the US on the ground (outside of the academic discourse) is about the ideas of microaggressions, unconscious bias, and in the words of a terribly misguided song from a few years back, “accidentally racist.” As I often tell my students when discussing these concepts, if I step on your foot, it doesn’t matter whether I tripped or on-purpose stomped on you–it still hurts. The parallels between the accidental transmission of a disease and the accidental transmission / reteaching of racist norms–culminating in a racialized and hierarchical society–is something that I would be interesting in exploring further. In this summer’s oft-read (and oft-misunderstood) bestseller How to Be An Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi looks at his experiences of surviving cancer and surviving racism in tandem. He describes how he will most likely be killed by cancer–but that against all odds, he will survive — and then applies the same metaphor to the US and its cancer of racism. Through looking at sociological impacts of the pandemic, we can make the same connections between infectious disease and our societal infection of racism–what some scholars are calling “COVID-1619.” And this can help us fully embrace the paradox that is our current reality.
Hi everyone, I’m really looking forward to your facilitation!
As Lexi said in her comment, the Walker reading mirrors Covid-19 in many ways. The current pandemic we are facing is unlike anything I remember or have experienced before. Any pandemic can cause anxiety and unrest, but this one feels especially challenging with the mishandling of it by the GOP. From the get-go, we have been unprepared and playing catch-up to Covid-19.
Personally, I’ve been fortunate during this pandemic (due to my privileges and nothing else). My job allowed me to work remotely which is something I continue to do, my family has been safe, my small-town has only had a handful of known cases, and my semester has been all online since September. As a family, we actually think we had Corona mildly back in January after my brother-in-law visited CA.
I think overall, pandemics do provide the opportunity to create new things, as Roy discusses in her piece. However, we have to be willing to make the changes and we have to be conscious of the death toll. Millions of people have died because of our negligence and refusal to listen–to make appropriate changes in time. We do have the opportunity to learn our lesson, but with the number of people still crying “hoax” will we actually make any changes? I’m not sure yet.
Hi all! Thanks for these great readings and discussion questions. It’s been fascinating to revisit Roy now several weeks later (and months after she wrote it). I love what Lexi pointed out about how the optimistic interpretation of pandemics can reflect one’s privilege. The task, I think, if one does find oneself in the privileged position of feeling optimistic about changing the future (and not surrounded by death, poverty, illness, struggling to put a roof over one’s head or to scrape together money for your family’s next meal) is using that energy and enthusiasm for activism & the dismantling of systems of privilege. Tuning into those moments that make us feel good — that make us feel like we’re making a difference — is so crucial in sustaining the long marathon effort to fight for social justice, as we join those who’ve been fighting for justice for centuries. I’m thinking of Stacey Abrams and how her activism builds on the work of many Black feminists before her like Ella Baker and Septima Clark.
I know you asked us about the pandemic, but I guess my mind is still on the election and thinking through the connectedness of it all.
Looking forward to continuing these conversations this afternoon!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/09/black-feminists-taught-democrats-go-broad-win-big/
Thank you, Skylar, Jess, and Gabby, for preparing this facilitation with an interesting question and thought-provoking texts. The entirety of the time as I read the text by Ward, the question asked by Bobbie at the beginning of the semester kept repeating itself in the back of my head: “How can we recover emotionally and psychologically from being socially distant from others for so long and trained to believe that every person we meet has the potential to kill every person we love?” Reading about people like “Typhoid Mary” and “Gaetan Dugas” had me asking another question: How can one recover knowing that they may have unintentionally spread a virus to many and/or people they love and continue living while they suffer? Even though I stay safe, I fear about what may happen if something like that ever occurred.
As it concerns myself, being in a pandemic certainly has its effects. I haven’t seen a friend from beyond the computer screen since the beginning of August. Of course, I’d rather stay at home than risk someone I appreciate getting sick. If I had to give a word to the vibes I am feeling, it would be “frustration”. Just like we are bottled up at home, so are our feelings and we need to find new ways of releasing them in a healthy and productive manner. I agree with the statements on privilege that Lexi made in her comment and relate to this by asking what if there is no way to release all the frustration we feel in such a manner? When your life has been turned upside-down and you are wondering when your next paycheck is coming and if it is safe for you to go out into the streets, creative pursuits really isn’t the first thing that is going to be on your mind.
When it comes to this question about the pandemic, I must say that I have thought about my answer without even knowing for sure what was the question. In other words, I have thought a lot about how lucky I am since the pandemic began that my life really has not changed all that much. Looking particularly at my life, I really did not have to make any big changes. At the time the pandemic began, I was not going to school, and so I only had to watch as my girlfriend’s education went from in-person to over Zoom call. While I am experiencing that difference now, I would be lying if I said it felt like a monumental difference to me.
As for my job, we had some things change in the early days of the pandemic. I work with people with disabilities, and we were told we could only work with them for certain objectives, so my workload was lessened and changed a bit at first. My pay also increased at first, but that has since gone back to normal, just like most facets of my job. The main difference in my job that still remains is that we are not allowed to have groups of people work together — we have to work on our own and with only one person, unless they are related. Other than that, the only things that have changed are the result of the rules and recommendations of Cortland County, such as facemasks, hand sanitizer, and the on-again off-again relationship they have with basketball hoops in the town. As for my life outside of school and work, I still feel pretty much like I can do and go wherever I could before the pandemic. There are small changes — instead of bowling a lot like I was, I now golf a lot, and instead of going to the movies a lot I now watch way too many YouTube videos — and I can’t eat inside at some places or have to make reservations to go to other places (like the JM McDonalds Sports Complex), but again, I just feel like my life hasn’t changed too much over the past 7-8 months because of the virus.
I want to reiterate that I feel very lucky that my life has not been changed to much by something that is out of my control. Some of my family has been able to keep their routines pretty regular, but my mom was let go from her job, began unemployment, and then was re-hired in a different position. My brothers and their significant others have to do more sanitation and safety protocols than before, but their jobs have remained pretty steady. Initially, some members of my family were really worried about the pandemic, and my uncle even wanted to make sure he stayed six feet away from us when visiting, and I know that I was scared to get too close to my grandma for the first few weeks. One thing this virus does make me think of is how it would have affected my dad. My father passed away from pancreatic cancer last year, but if he was still here today (like many people living with cancer are), I wonder how much he would be able to do in Cortland and how much I would be able to see him. I wonder just how hard this pandemic has made it for some families that have members dealing with health issues, and how everything from visiting them to getting proper medicine to going to the doctor’s has increased in difficulty and precaution.
I realize I probably rambled on a bit in this response, but I appreciate the thought-provoking question and look forward to today’s class.
Jacob