Fifteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Public health measures to contain COVID-19 are necessary in mitigating viral spread, but these measures also produce other effects, effects which contain, limit, and exclude bodily movement or access to resources. I look to various global sites to consider how public health measures implemented for containment, such as border shutdowns, travel restrictions, social distancing guidelines, and mask mandates, may also exacerbate pre-existing vulnerabilities of migrants, the undocumented, and homeless individuals, and especially those at the intersection of multiple oppressions, including disability or illness, substance dependencies, identifying as LGBTQ, being impoverished or low-income, and identifying as racially or ethnically distinct from the majority. In examining the spectrum of what containment contains, I consider how public health operates in service of general publics, often excluding the non-majority who tend to be more susceptible to contracting disease that public health measures are geared towards in the first place. I examine COVID-19 public health measures implemented at the U.S.-Mexico border, in refugee and migrant detention centers in the Mediterranean, and from artificial intelligence technologies (“anti-epidemic” robots and police or surveillance robotic technologies). Here, I interrogate how COVID-19 containment measures may be inappropriately applied towards certain populations who exist outside of the normative, general public and how they may serve other political interests. Additionally, I use queer theory, disability studies, and cultural studies frameworks to question how the management and distribution of health by governing entities is always political, and in doing so, imagine how public health could be more equitable and accessible to all.