Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the world including in France, Canada, Lithuania, Austria, Italy, and Ireland imposed ‘vaccine passports’ on the premise that they would curtail transmission of the virus, reduce COVID-19 related mortalities, and enable society to return to neoliberal normality. However, vaccine passports raise several important and troubling issues that have not been given sufficient attention within the social sciences. Therefore, this article offers a critique of vaccine passports. It is structured into three key themes: (a) scientifically and ethically problematic, (b) the death of the social and the ‘Other’, and (c) digital surveillance and freedom. The article begins by exploring how vaccine passports make little scientific sense and further entrench some unvaccinated peoples’ sense of political and medical mistrust. It then discusses how they amplify social divisions, creating the unvaccinated Other in society and intensifying the neoliberal shift towards a post-social, contactless world. The paper closes with an outline of how vaccine passports were cast as enabling a return to neoliberal normality and freedom, hinging upon an assumption of harmlessness while cementing the negative ideology of capitalist realism.
This article explores the problem of sleep deprivation amongst migrant workers in North East England’s night-time economy (NTE). After first outlining some of the physical and psychological effects of sleep loss, the narrative then focuses on primary accounts drawn from unstructured interviews ( n = 16) and short vignettes with migrant workers. The article uses a framework grounded in social harm to explicate the declining recognition afforded to sleep and recuperation among night workers, constructing this as a socially corrosive outcome of neoliberal economic relations and the cultural injunctions that accompany it. The forfeiture of sleep among workers can also form an important point of departure for exploring a nexus of harms that suffuse the nocturnal service industry for low-paid migrant workers. These can have far-reaching consequences for well-being, as they expose the fraying of labour relations in the NTE and act as an affront to the possibility of human flourishing.
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