A Multidisciplinary Conference in Salerno, Italy
10-12 April 2024
The first in our project’s series of collaborative workshops was held in Salerno, Italy, from 10-12 April 2024. These workshops gather sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists from four continents to examine the pandemic’s effects on global public health.
BIOPOLITICS AFTER THE PANDEMIC?
If we understand biopolitics as a concept that denotes how, in modernity, the biological existence of populations became a central object of power, it is easy to see why this notion is central to analyzing pandemic discourses and policies.
Clearly, the fit with the pandemic is obvious, though our premise is more precisely that the Covid-19 pandemic inaugurated a novel form of biopolitics. In what seemed like a chain reaction of panic and uncertainty, governments around the world made use of pre-existing and newly emerging health (and) data infrastructures in an attempt to curb contagion by limiting people’s movements and opportunities for face-to-face social interaction. Although social distancing and social isolation, governed through bureaucratic practices, are of course not entirely new phenomena, the scale on which they became part of the Covid-19 lexicon and of people’s technologies of the self during the pandemic was unprecedented.
THE WORKSHOP
In this first multidisciplinary workshop, organized by philosopher Davide Tarizzo and anthropologist Federico Scarpelli, we gathered renowned philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists from around the world to reflect on the biopolitical reconfigurations brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the contributors had already been engaging with biopolitical paradoxes through their own modalities of thought, working on topics like global health, pandemic preparedness, the politics of health governance, postcolonial labor relations and care infrastructures, and more. The Salerno workshop thus kickstarted our wider project by facilitating the sharing of insights on the transformations that the pandemic provoked in the contributors’ disciplinary, thematic, and regional fields of expertise.
The Salerno workshop took a first step towards redefining post-pandemic biopolitics in the global health arena. The pandemic invalidated long-standing discourses of global collaboration and solidarity as it generated a swift return to national and exclusionary policies, challenged the self-evidence of government protection, pandemic preparedness, and public health institutions. To develop new frameworks for understanding these dynamics, we invited collaborators who use innovative methods and concepts to reflect on meanings of the social and the ethical in post-pandemic landscapes and explore (re-)emergent forms of governance and care.
Aside from offering an opportunity for our collaborators to meet in person for the first time, our meeting at the University of Salerno, located in the scenic Campania region of Italy, was a chance to crystallize the concepts and concerns that will bind us together in a broader dialogue over the coming year.
We can synthesize four key themes and questions emerging from the three days of presentations and discussions in Salerno:
1. Pandemic Rationalities and Reconfigurations of the Social
2. Biopolitics and Governmentality
3. The Social and the Natural
4. The Human and the Technological
QUESTIONS FOR THE COMING YEAR
The presentations in Salerno highlighted the potential for anthropology, sociology, and engaged philosophy to critically examine and open new ways of thinking about the social and biopolitical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Building on the contributions we gathered during this first workshop, we take the following questions on board for our upcoming workshops in Delhi (December 2024) and Ithaca, New York (May 2025):
How do institutions shape and constrain social life, and what are the implications for individual and community experiences?
How, if at all, has the pandemic reconfigured the domain of the social and the boundaries of population groups; in other words, transformed the object of biopolitics? What registers of data and information, in the form of bodies, communities, histories and geographies, can now generate knowledge?
What are the underlying rationalities, technologies, and power dynamics that drive different forms of biopolitical governance, and how can these be critically examined?
What novel or renewed dimensions of living and dying, and affiliated forms of social and governance infrastructures, have emerged during and after the pandemic?
What is the role of anthropology in critically examining taken-for-granted assumptions and opening up new ways of thinking about social, political, and health-related phenomena?
Thank you to all the participants for this wonderful start to what promises to be an exciting and enduring collaboration on “The Biopolitics of Global Health after COVID-19”
Davide Tarizzo, Yasmeen Arif, Timothy Campbell, Thomas Cousins, Alex Nading, Carlo Caduff, Sanil V., Annelin Eriksen, Frédéric Keck, Federico Scarpelli, Carmelo Colangelo, Massimo Villani, Marco Piasentier, Martin Eggen Mogseth, Aldo Trucchio, Fartein Hauan Nilsen
