THE PROJECT

The project 'The Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid-19' brings together world-leading philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists from various geographical regions to reflect on the pandemic and its aftermath, forging a new kind of intellectual and ethnographic work to analyze biopolitical locations.

​

Through a series of collaborative workshops, we aim to explore the heterogeneity of pandemic responses, lived experiences, and afterlives. Our starting point is that biopolitical thought - although crucial in understanding the dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic - remains overly walled off from practice. It is time, we propose, to blur the disciplinary boundaries and renew the relationship between philosopher and ethnographer and in so doing challenge and renew a perspective on global health in a post-pandemic world based more on inclusion than exclusion.

 

The project encompasses a series of workshops held in three different sites:

​​​

1. University of Salerno, Italy

10-12 April 2024 | Led by Davide Tarizzo and Federico Scarpelli

​

​​

​

2. Shiv Nadar University, New Delhi, India

13-15 December 2024 | Led by Yasmeen Arif

​

3. Cornell University, Ithaca, United States

5-8 May 2024 | Led by Timothy Campbell

 

Each of these workshops forms a laboratory for thought, reflection, and response to a globally uncertain post-pandemic world. The workshops connect philosophical concepts and empirical groundwork and foster disciplinary collaboration across the geographical localities of the project.

​

We are curious about the way novel invocations of 'the social' became the object of power during the Covid-19 pandemic - in lockdowns, through social distancing, and varying forms of collective attempts at healthcare. Through this focus, the project invites scholars to reflect on localized knowledge and practices of the social as a basis for sustained critiques of global health institutions.

 

The project stages encounters between academics and local stakeholders, including medical professionals, artists, and policymakers - bringing ethnographic "informants" into the conversation as philosophical interlocutors. This experimental workshop structure - featuring discussions among scholars and practitioners - will allow for preliminary analyses of the institutional and non-institutional response to the pandemic, while laying the groundwork for a published volume that will appear in the project’s wake.