Toward healthier futures in post‐pandemic times: Political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care

Abstract

The COVID‐19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature–political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care—to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.

Necropolitics as accumulation: Enforcement and enclosure in Brisbane during COVID-19

“…These possibilities begin with articulating shared humanity and moving outside of institutional classifications, such as those reinforced through discourses of ‘rescue’ and ‘refugees welcome.’ Ultimately, recentering state inflicted forms of injury across different state-based classifications is vital in counteracting necropolitical exclusion. Placing emphasis on the significance of livable futures for migrant, Indigenous, and citizen populations alike may challenge prevailing hierarchies in ways that could generate meaningful solidarities and push back against the boundaries carved out by the state ( Carlson, 2022 ; Neely & Lopez, 2022 ). Indigenous, migrant, and non-Indigenous people alike are making powerful efforts to draw visibility to these exclusions.…”

“…I use the concept of ‘necropolitics’ to visibilize the disproportionate dangers that migrant and Indigenous Australians have experienced during the pandemic: such as the body burdens of adverse risk to viral transmission, acute stress, mental instability, and elevated rates of violence and abuse ( Neely & Lopez, 2022 ). However, I do so in ways that see people not as abject ( Agamben, 1998 ), as exploitable workers, wasted populations ( Bauman, 2004 ) or even slaves, the framings through which exploitation is usually treated.…”

Geographies of science and technology III: Careful entanglements, responsible futures

“…Recent work in health geography has documented landscapes of care which are rapidly shifting under the ongoing politics of neoliberalism (Jupp, 2022), colonialism (Hirsch, 2020), and militarism (McCormack, 2022), as well as the structural violences and upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic (Bowlby and Jupp, 2021;Neely and Lopez, 2022). In particular, a growing body of work is examining the 'ambivalent effects of digital technologies' (Schwiter and Steiner, 2020: 1) on geographies of care at scales from the body (Schurr et al, 2023) and the household (Jackman and Brickell, 2022) to transnational spaces of migration and mobility (Acedera and Yeoh, 2021), mapping a spatial politics which troubles assumed notions of distance and proximity in relations of care (Hanrahan and Smith, 2020) For example, Louise Reid's work on 'technologyenabled care' (TEC) has focused on how both practices of care and notions of home are being transformed by new and emerging healthcare technologies.…”

“There Would Be More Black Spaces”: Care/giving Cartographies during COVID‐19

“…In her conceptualization of “wake work,” Christina Sharpe ( 2016 ) theorizes care as “repair, maintenance, attention” as well as “shared risk” (p. 131) made necessary “in the wake” (i.e., “living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery”) (p. 2). Building on the Black feminist literature on care and imagining and creating worlds otherwise (Perry 2013 ), and especially in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic and state‐sanctioned police violence (Neely and Lopez 2022 ), in this article we mobilize pluralistic interpretations of “care/giving” as performed and evidenced through the co‐production of narratives and counter‐maps. Our framing of these activities as care/giving seeks to make explicitly visible: the emotional, reproductive, and life‐affirming labors performed by caregivers; the ways in which these labors fall unevenly along lines of race, gender, and class (Mullings 1995 ); and the polysemous nature of care as a site of mitigating and inducing harm and comprising “a critical survival strategy” (Hobart and Kneese 2020 : 2; see also Kaba 2021 ).…”