Series Culture and Health
Publisher UCL Press
Format Open Access PDF / Paperback / Hardback

The Book

COVID-19 continues to cause severe morbidity and ongoing mortality. Covid’s Chronicities documents the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies and communities, and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.

This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.

Contents

1 Introduction: care, chronic neglect and intentional forgetting
Nancy J. Burke and Lenore Manderson

2 Fraying and patched homes: home and homeliness during the pandemic
Tuva B. Broch and Ida Hensler

3 Time and chronicity at the frontline of the pandemic in Japan
Junko Teruyama, Sachiko Horiguchi, Shuhei Kimura and the Covid Primary Care Collaboration

4 How time paused … COVID-19 and everyday life in Viet Nam Jennifer Ilo Van Nuil and Ha Nguyen Thanh

5 Children of Covid
Lisa J.Hardy

6 Overdose, COVID-19, and the unending churn of intervention in Vancouver, Canada
Danya Fast

7 The numbers game: Laila, Covid and the Egyptian constitution
Nefissa Naguib

8 Hunger’s chronicities: Covid and nutrition in a Mam-Maya Community in Guatemala
Emily Yates-Doerr, Rosario García Meza, and María García Maldonado

9 Chronicities of care: Mesoamerican immigrant and Indigenous farmworker families during COVID-19
The Covid-19 Farmworker Study Collective with Tomás A. Madrigal, Jennifer Martinez-Medina and Dvera I. Saxton

10 Chronic vulnerability, COVID-19 and the long fight of Indigenous Amazonian communities
Indira Vargas, Andrés Tapia and Carolyn Smith-Morris

11 Echoes of the past: epidemics and resilience among Indigenous peoples of the Upper Rio Negro, Brazil
Carolina Batista, Danilo Paiva Ramos and Rafaela Achatz

12 Covid, postpartum mental health and the decolonization of Indigenous family services
Heather Howard-Bobiwash, Danielle Gartner and Madeline Nash

13 Structured neglect and moral action: Punjabi and Hmong community-based organizations’ pandemic response in California’s San Joaquin Valley
Nancy J. Burke, Premjot K. Saroya and Chia Thao

14 Vaccine trials and the politics of extraction
Lenore Manderson and Susan Levine

15 ‘We’re the health care in the town, pretty much’: rural community pharmacy and the chronicity of systemic precarity
Laura L. Heinemann and Ellen B. Rubinstein

16 ‘But we want cassava not COVID-19 vaccines’: the politics of vaccination in Uganda
Grace Akello

17 The chronicity of militarism: Sri Lanka’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
Priyanka Jayakodi

18 Beyond COVID-19: Caring by words in Long COVID discourses in Japan and Sweden
Claudia Merli