In the United Kingdom, the government’s failure to consistently record the race and ethnicity of those who have died from COVID-19 and the disproportionate mortality impact of the virus on Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities speaks to a systemic failure to account for the interplay between the social construction of race and the lived experience of racism, itself presented biologically as ‘poor health’. This failure has run for far longer and far deeper than many would care to admit. In this article, I use my own positionality as a ‘Mixed-Race Black’ woman to argue that the unique place of medical anthropology to sit at the intersection of the social, political, biological, and ecological means it can provide alternative approaches to understanding the disproportionate impacts of the pandemic and lay some foundations for repair strategies that encompass the patterns, processes, and constructs of health inequality.
‘Covid-19 and Me’ was an affective learning blog post exercise assigned to 1st year undergraduate students taking a medical anthropology module at the start of academic year 2020-21. We describe the way in which a collective analysis of the accounts was undertaken and how these were presented and discussed in a set of online and face-to-face seminars. We discuss whether Covid-19 was indeed a ‘portal’ in Arundhati Roy’s use of the term, arguing that it was the written reflection and collective anthropological analysis of their accounts, rather than the virus itself, that enabled students to ‘imagine the world anew’.
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