Learning to Live With the COVID Virus and Extreme Inequality
Used over a year ago by right-wing commentator John Redwood to denote a new modus vivendi for global capitalism, ‘learning to live with the virus’ has been an idée fixe of the Johnson government for the last few months. Its...
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Living under the medical gaze in a time of pandemics
It’s a Sin shows us what it’s like to feel the medical gaze in times of pandemics It’s a Sin is a new drama series (Channel 4 and HBO) written by Russell T Davies which chronicles the lives of a...
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Self-Harm: Response and Reaction
Self-harm is clinically referred to as Non-Suicidal Self-Injury. It is described as an act which causes direct harm to the body but one where the focus is harm itself and not some other goal. Research into self-harm over the last...
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Sweden is no libertarian paradise for dealing with COVID
Libertarian and conservative commentators extol Sweden as an alternative model for dealing with the COVID pandemic that steers away from the lockdowns with which we are familiar in the United Kingdom and the United States. Elon Musk and Toby Young,...
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Health Inequalities and COVID-19
Health Inequalities matter: why the poor and disadvantaged are more likely to die of COVID Anxious politicians want to make the case that COVID doesn’t discriminate, in order to frame the fatalities as effecting us equally rather than being due...
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Disposable humans?
A response to the recent social commentary on the perceived value of individuals with ‘underlying health conditions’ The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the fabric of society and has left many wondering about the social, political and economic structures that will...
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Reasonable adjustments: work in the time of corona
Our universities have shut, and we do not know for how long. Many of us are adjusting to working remotely. The global pandemic of coronavirus is changing the way we interact socially, and changing the way we work. While employers...
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Diary of a cough: meaning matters
I’ve had a cough for all of the year 2020. It started on January 1st, after sharing Christmas meals and their preparation with an explosively sneezing brother. In my family, we like to blame our infections on a particular person,...
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Coronavirus: how the current number of people dying in the UK compares to the past decade
The speed of the global spread of coronavirus is staggering. On March 5, Chris Whitty, the UK’s chief medical adviser, announced the death, in Berkshire, of the first UK patient to have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease associated with...
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Ebola: Media Narratives and Public Responses
The Ebola crisis has been described by the WHO as “the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times” and national governments, aid organisations and others have reacted to the crisis at this level. But what about public understandings...
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The fleeting solidarities of the pandemic?