Refugees, political bounding and the pandemic: material effects and experiences of categorisations amongst refugees in Scotland

Scholars are increasingly interested in and concerned with both the way various migrant populations are categorised, and the lived impacts of that categorisation. In this article, we examine how categorisation was experienced by people at various stages of the refugee journey during the biggest public health crisis for generations. We argue, using original interview data, that the way refugees are categorised, or politically bound, has material impacts on the way they experience their lives, and that this was evident in extremis during the Covid-19 lockdown in Scotland. As populations attempted to traverse public health messaging, this is shown to interact with longstanding state proclivities to control, marginalise and stratify. Consequently, how people experienced and managed the request to ‘stay home and save lives’ varied markedly by where they were in their refugee journey and how they arrived in the UK. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Moving target, moving parts: The multiple mobilities of the COVID-19 pandemic

This chapter explores mobilities paradigm to map the United Kingdom (UK)‘s Coronavirus disease (COVID) response and illustrate how inequalities in mobility, interwoven in different sites and at different scales - micro, meso and macro - generated cascades of systemic failure that limited the effectiveness of local and national responses, evident in the fact that during the first half of 2020 the UK had the highest excess mortality rate in Europe. Delivery drivers, public transport and warehouse workers, porters and other low-paid employees were suddenly re-labelled as ‘key workers’. Risk and protection, access to healthcare and testing, paid work and social welfare are all deeply inflected with questions of mobility and therefore the inequalities and power differentials they produce. The Coronavirus Act of 2020 provides a unique window into the UK’s governance of the COVID crisis. It is an emergency legislation, which grants the government blanket, time-limited decree powers over broad areas of the public, health and economic sectors. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Deborah Lupton and Karen Willis.

Emergency Mail-in Voting in Rhode Island: Protecting Civic Participation During COVID-19 and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic challenges safe and equitable voting in the United States' 2020 elections, and in response, several states including Rhode Island (RI) have made significant changes to election policy. In addition to increasing accessibility of mail-in voting by mailing applications to all registered voters, RI has suspended their notary/witness requirement for both the primary and general election. However, RI's "emergency" voting process still plays a crucial role in allowing voters who missed the mail-in ballot application deadline, such as those unexpectedly hospitalized in the days leading up to the election, to still cast their ballot. COVID-19 has also forced RI to modify its emergency voting procedures, most notably allowing healthcare workers to serve on bipartisan ballot delivery teams. This commentary highlights these salient updates to voting procedures and serves as a primer as to how interested health care workers may navigate this process alongside patients and lead in the arena of patient voting rights.