COVID-19: what is not being addressed

Gupte, Jaideep; Mitlin, Diana

doi:10.1177/0956247820963961

Cited by 43 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…An examination of how India’s slums are positioned to confront the coronavirus crisis must grow out of an understanding of the ways in which these communities are organized during ‘normal times.’ Such knowledge is crucial for designing and implementing local resilience strategies that are “co-produced” between the state and communities ( Ostrom, 1996 , Gupte and Mitlin, 2020 ). In this section, we sketch the contours of informal governance in India’s slums, drawing on our fieldwork and survey research in Bhopal and Jaipur.…”

Section: Informal Community Governance In India’s Slumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does Covid-19 affect urban slums? Evidence from settlement leaders in India

Auerbach

Thachil

2021

World Development

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Slum settlements have received significant attention for their vulnerabilities to the spread of Covid-19. To mitigate risks of transmission, and alleviate economic distress associated with containment measures, public health experts and international agencies are calling for community-driven solutions that harness local participation. In slum settlements, such approaches will encounter the informal slum leaders present across cities of the Global South. How are slum leaders positioned to address the health and livelihood threats of the pandemic within their neighborhoods? What problem-solving activities, if any, have they performed for residents during the pandemic? What factors shape success in those efforts? To answer these questions, we conducted a phone survey of 321 slum leaders across 79 slum settlements in two north Indian cities. The survey was conducted in April and May 2020, at the height of India’s stringent national lockdown in response to the virus. Our survey reveals striking continuities with pre-pandemic politics. First, slum leaders persist in their problem-solving roles, even as they shift their efforts towards requesting urgently needed government relief (particularly food rations). Second, slum leaders vary in their reported ability to gather information about relief schemes, make claims, and command government responsiveness. The factors that inform the effectiveness of slum leaders during ‘normal times’, notably their education and degree of embeddedness in party networks, continue to do so during the lockdown. Slum leader reliance on partisan networks raises concerns regarding the inclusiveness of their efforts. Finally, slums are not uniformly challenged in maintaining social distancing. Pre-pandemic disparities in infrastructural development fragment the degree to which residents must depart from social distancing guidelines to secure essential services.

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Section: Informal Community Governance In India’s Slumsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How does Covid-19 affect urban slums? Evidence from settlement leaders in India

Auerbach

Thachil

2021

World Development

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“…There has been a call for collaborative interventions to fight the COVID-19 pandemic (Pan American Health Organization & World Health Organization, 2020). The responses to COVID-19 tend to promote "technological" and "scientific" solutions to the extent of overshadowing other approaches, including the social (Gupte & Mitlin, 2020).…”

Section: The Covid-19 Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ubuntu Philosophy as a Humanistic–Existential Framework for the Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic

Chigangaidze

Matanga

Katsuro

2021

Journal of Humanistic Psychology

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Ubuntu has been identified by several scholars as a philosophy that provides a framework to fight health disasters such as COVID-19. Ubuntu refers to the African worldview of seeing oneself through others. It refers to the pattern of interconnectedness between people in the form of a philosophy or worldview. Ubuntu explores concerns about cosmic and global context of life. This article stipulates that Ubuntu can provide ways to deal with challenges that emerge with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ubuntu fosters the integrated components of humanity as it appreciates the biological, psychosocial, spiritual, and environmental aspects of life. The article explores several themes such as self-awareness and societal responsibility, holism, spirituality, health promotion, food security, social justice and human rights, generosity, sharing, and teamwork. Others have advanced that Ubuntu is a philosophy to adopt in the fight against epidemics, and we seek to broaden the debate by exploring Ubuntu axiological and ontological humanistic–existential themes. Finally, the article calls for the adoption of Ubuntu philosophy in psychological and social work interventions in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

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“…While they were quick to identify dense informal areas as high risk, tech-based interventions such as mobile apps with track-and-trace functions were uncritical and unnuanced towards the deeply unequal socio-economic relationships that also characterised these areas. The solutions proposed assumed access to digital infrastructures, whereas access is deeply gendered (World Wide Web Foundation 2015); they assumed people's movements were voluntary and that isolation was easily enforceable, whereas the labour and other socio-economic relationships of the subaltern are often compulsory in nature (Gupte & Mitlin 2021) and isolation is not possible (Wilkinson 2020).…”

Section: Researching the Violence 'Of' The Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The nature of such interventions notwithstanding, grass-roots activity of and in relation to subaltern groups in low-income urban settings has not ceased during the pandemic, even if it has responded to the pandemic in many significant ways. Community groups in low-income across various contexts in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa have continued to provide links and interactions with and between state agencies to address local needs (Gupte & Mitlin 2021). In Indian cities, too, self-organisation by subaltern groups has continued to meaningfully shape the urban condition (see, for example, Auerbach & Thachil 2021), in continuation of the mass mobilisation movements that have historically advocated housing rights in the face of eviction and demolition drives by 'neoliberal populism' (A. Roy 2010) seeking to redevelop informal spaces in the city.…”

Section: Researching the Violence 'Of' The Pandemicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

Gupte¹,

Zahan²

2021

JBA

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The public health containment measures in response to COVID-19 have precipitated a significant epistemic and ontological shift in �bottom-up� and �action-oriented� approaches in development studies research. �Lockdown� necessitates physical and social distancing between research subject and researcher, raising legitimate concerns around the extent to which �distanced� action-research can be inclusive and address citizens� lack of agency. Top-down regimes to control urban spaces through lockdown in India have not stemmed the experience of violence in public spaces: some have dramatically intensified, while others have changed in unexpected ways. Drawing on our experiences of researching the silent histories of violence and memorialisation of past violence in urban India over the past three decades, we argue that the experience of subaltern groups during the pandemic is not an aberration from their sustained experiences of everyday violence predating the pandemic. Exceptionalising the experiences of violence during the pandemic silences past histories and disenfranchises long struggles for rights in the city. At the same time, we argue that research practices employed to interpret the experience of urban violence during lockdown in India need to engage the changing nature of infrastructural regimes, as they seek to control urban spaces, and as subaltern groups continue to mobilise and advocate, in new ways.

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COVID-19: what is not being addressed

Cited by 43 publications

References 12 publications

How does Covid-19 affect urban slums? Evidence from settlement leaders in India

How does Covid-19 affect urban slums? Evidence from settlement leaders in India

Ubuntu Philosophy as a Humanistic–Existential Framework for the Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic

Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

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