Researching a History of Epidemics in Sierra Leone during the Coronavirus Pandemic (original) (raw)

Childhood and the pandemic: Chronicle of an absence foretold

SALUD COLECTIVA, 2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic has made visible, childhood is the virus's proverbial south: a world where care is not a value chosen from a place of desire, and where children's voices are silenced at the hands of an ancestral epistemic injustice. Thus, the transformation that human societies are undergoing due to COVID-19 has significantly impacted the rights of children, both at the micro and the macro levels. In Spain-a country that has been particularly hard-hit by the pandemic-we find that both infancy (especially through obstetric violence) and childhood at all its stages fall victim to an adultcentric paradigm based on control and epistemic injustice. This essay analyzes and discusses some of the negative consequences observed in this country related to the care for and the confinement of minors and their families-which has occurred as a result of the pandemic-and considers that the crisis triggered by COVID-19 may be an opportunity to shed light on situations of ancestral injustice towards children.

Perspectivizing pandemics: (how) do epidemic histories criss-cross contexts?

Journal of Global History, 2020

This article explores a smattering of thematic questions that criss-cross the articles in this special pandemics issue; it signposts some reverberations, overlapping responses, and problematic comparisons currently (mid 2020) being made between past pandemics and the tense experiences (and projections going forward) of COVID-19 across the world. The historical pandemics covered here offer an entry point to a fruitful set of genealogies, chronologies, epidemiologies, trajectories, and imaginaries linked to a host of issues: what makes a pandemic ‘global’? What does a global history perspective bring to the table? How does examining germs and genomes shed light on imperialism as a/the pandemic driver? Where do animals, the environment, and ecology fit in and why are they so often excluded from pandemic histories? What counts as medical humanitarianism when health knowledge, know-how, and cooperation ‘from below’ are sidelined? And what came/comes first: a pandemic or a changed world?

Care in a territory of social exclusion: covid-19 exposes colonial marks

2021

A intersecção de gênero, raça e classe marca os territórios de exclusão social, especialmente em um país que carrega cicatrizes da colonialidade patriarcal e capitalista em suas estruturas, como é o caso do Brasil. O objetivo deste trabalho é compreender o cuidado em um desses territórios: a cidade de Cubatão/SP. A investigação, feita entre 2017 e 2020, incluiu a pandemia da covid-19, que sobrecarregou o cuidado no território. O método foi a pesquisa qualitativa, com oficinas, observação participante e entrevistas de profundidade. O cuidado era majoritariamente oferecido por mulheres, líderes comunitárias e profissionais da atenção primária do Sistema Único de Saúde. Para analisar os dados, utilizou-se a hermenêutica de profundidade. O referencial teórico foi a costura das teorias feministas da ética do cuidado, ecofeministas e interseccionais. A pesquisa revelou diversos desafios e potencialidades, como o cuidado ético-político, eixo da busca por justiça socioambiental.The intersec...

Pandemics and urban child survival: Pulling together in the adoption canoe

storywork to link the importance of knowing our own family histories, and how those historical, cultural and current contexts can be a force to advocate, influence, research and teach for change. The "canoe" is a metaphor for re-conceptualizing adoption narratives, and emphasizes the idea of an "adoption journey" or a shared learning process.

Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS (in AIDS and the Distribution of Crises)

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, 2020

Chapter 8 of the volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke UP 2020), co-edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani. “Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS” is a dialogue between artists, activists, social service providers, and scholars Cecilia Aldarondo, Roger Hallas, Pablo Alvarez, Jim Hubbard, and Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyễn, with an Introduction by Jih-Fei Cheng. The conversation figures between individual and collective experiences with HIV/AIDS. Recorded here is pain, fury, resentment, fear, determination, and more. The first prompt for this asynchronous set of “dispatches” commenced in September 2016. The second prompt was initiated in December 2017 and registers the anxiety and impassioned responses to what was then the new election of US president Donald Trump. Whether their edges are left coarse or worn soft, these memories of AIDS refuse to be resembled—to look exactly like one another or simply reflect one another. They also refuse assembly into a singular or coherent past. We trace these memories of shattered pasts with our fingertips. We struggle to love and hold each other with barriers; we struggle to love and hold each other without barriers.

Histories of the past and histories of the future: pandemics and historians of education

Paedagogica Historica

The COVID-19 outbreak at the beginning of the 2020s not only marked a dramatic moment in world health, but also the start of manifold and entangled global crises that seem to define a watershed moment with severe effects on education. Pandemics we know are recurrent events. Faced with COVID-19 some historians have looked to previous pandemics to understand the nature of the disease and its trajectory, and how previous generations have dealt with similar health crises. This special issue intends not to reinforce narratives of the past but rather to question them. The histories that have been written for this special issue Histories of the Past and Histories of the Future: Pandemics and Historians of Education offer insights that refer to past and future research agendas. They look at the mediation and circulation of knowledge during past pandemics, trace unheard voices and emotions of pandemics, analyse national policies and emerging discourses, and underline the entangled histories of education and pandemics. Collectively the articles brought together in this issue forcibly suggest that the most fruitful and rewarding way forward to studying past pandemics lies in thinking ecologically. By assessing the myriad consequences of living in " pandemic times," of confronting exposure, transmission, transmutation, disruption, and loss, and looking to community and collective futures we believe we cannot study pandemics and their impact on education and children's lives without widening the aperture of our research. Adopting an ecological approach will help us to not only actively engage with histories of the present and contempory collecting, but also offer the possibility of new understandings and new insights into the dynamics and consequences of past pandemics.