Who works on the ‘frontline'? Comparing constructions of ‘frontline' work before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides a comparative analysis of how frontline workers were constructed by the UK media prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Both the News on the Web Corpus and the Coronavirus Corpus, as monitor corpora of web-based new articles, were utilised to identify changes in both the frequency and use of the word front*line from 2010 to 2021. Findings show that, following the outbreak of COVID-19, constructions of frontline work were more frequently associated with medical professions and became more figurative in nature. Our findings provide a counterpoint to claims that the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increased awareness of the critical nature of many types of ‘low-skilled' work not previously recognised as essential. The study also extends previous research which has traced changes in language and its deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reading Chinese anti-COVID-19 pandemic narratives on facemasks as the art of disaster governance: a semiotic and biopolitical survey

In China and around the world, the global spread of COVID-19 has made wearing a facemask more than a pragmatic or aesthetic individual-level issue: it has instilled in people deontic value. In Chinese anti-epidemic narratives, the semiotic ideology of wearing a facemask has been closely related to collectivism, patriotism and, to a certain degree, nationalism. The facemask not only serves as a protective biomedical device but also as a cultural, political and spatial sign of the line of defence against disorders of the natural system, to establish the order of the social system. This paper argues from the perspective of semiotics and life politics that such mask narratives have effectively helped China prevent the large-scale spread of the epidemic across the nation and have served as a means of collective psychotherapy, paradoxically transforming individual separation into collective spiritual cohesion. Previous semiotic studies of disaster have not paid much attention to plagues or disaster governance discourse, between which biomedicine plays an important role. Thus, this paper aims to shed light on how biomedicine works with politics in coding and decoding the relationship between the natural system of the plague and the social system of governance.

An Introduction to Biopolitics and Shock Economy of COVID-19: Medical Perspectives and Socioeconomic Dynamics

This edited volume on the biopolitics and shock economy of COVID-19 crisis embraces a wide spectrum of topics such as shock economy, medical perspectives on COVID-19, application of geospatial technology, infectivity, immunity, and severity of the disease, as well as ontology of the disease emergence as important factors for adoption of relevant biopolitical measures, sociocultural obstacles, COVID-19-induced transaction costs, social support and resilience of inhabitants of marginalized areas, as well as business resilience factors, entrepreneurship, and digital transformation. Through each chapter of this book, the authors, with their expertise in the theme they picked, have attempted to unfold some emerging aspects in the COVID-19 crisis which could benefit not only the academics but also the institutional, social, economic, developmental, and health policy-makers as well as the health practitioners on the ground. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Sex Workers' Everyday Security in the Netherlands and the Impact of COVID-19.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbates the existing insecurities of sex workers. This paper asks: What are sex workers' everyday experiences of (in)security? And: How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced these? Methods: We engage with these questions through collaborative research based on semi-structured interviews carried out in 2019 and 2020 with sex workers in The Hague, the Netherlands. Results: Revealing a stark mismatch between the insecurities that sex workers' experience and the concerns enshrined in regulation, our analysis shows that sex workers' everyday insecurities involve diverse concerns regarding their occupational safety and health, highlighting that work insecurity is more multi-faceted than sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Widespread employment and income insecurities for sex workers are exacerbated for transwomen and male sex workers. Their legal liminality is enabled not only by the opaque legal status of sex work in the Netherlands, but also by the gendering of official regulation. The COVID-19 pandemic made visible how the sexual and gender norms that informally govern sex workers' working conditions intersect with hierarchies of citizenship, complicating access to COVID-19 support, particularly for migrant sex workers. Conclusions: Sex work regulation in the Netherlands leaves workers in a limbo-not without obligations and surveillance, yet, without the full guarantee of their labour rights. Policy Implications: To effectively address sex workers' insecurities, a shift in regulation from its current biopolitical focus to a labour approach is necessary. Besides, public policy and civil society actors alike need to address the sex industry's harmful social regulation through hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race.

COVID19 in Latin America: informal settlements and the politics of urbicide.

Informal settlements in Latin America express pandemic idiosyncrasies, calling global attention to historical problems related to a specific urbanization pattern. This article stresses COVID19 implications in the main urban planning canon: the notion of densification as an urban solution. Traditionally invisible social groups and territories acquire relevance, but now as a source of biological risk. Urban density appears as a contradictory trigger point, outlining new debates about informal settlements and their metrics. Evidence shows that trends in health discourse are striving to legitimize and enhance "urbicides" in this scenario, already underway through State action or inaction.

Navigating responsible bio-political citizenship: Cross-country comparison of stigma in Covid-19 illness narratives in Germany, Japan, the UK and the USA.

This paper aims to further understanding of discourses of responsible bio-political citizenship during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was an interview-based qualitative study comparing experiences of 103 people who were ill with Covid for the first time across 2020 in Japan, Germany, the USA and the UK. Comparative thematic analysis explored discussion of responsibility in relation to Covid illness, experiences of social fracture and stigma, and the strategies employed to resist or mitigate stigma. This comparative analysis highlighted significant similarities across countries. We identified three mysteries of Covid illness experiences that impacted the work of navigating biopolitical citizenship. First, the mystery of how people caught Covid. There was an inherent paradox of following guidance yet nonetheless falling ill. Disclosure of Covid to minimise onward transmission was held in tension with accusations of irresponsibility. Second, the mystery of onward transmission. Uncertainty about transmission placed participants in a liminal space of potentially having caused harm to others. Third, the mystery of how long illness should last. Uncertainty about ongoing infectiousness made social re-entry difficult, particularly in instances of persistent symptoms. We demonstrate the instability of certainty in the context of new and emerging forms of biopolitical citizenship. Guidance and emerging scientific evidence sought to demystify Covid through providing certainty that could guide responsible actions, but where citizens experienced paradoxes this had the potential to exacerbate stigma.

International Boundaries, Biological Borders, and the Public Governance of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Are We Entering a Whole New Era?

Are international boundary lines likely to be the best places to implement health policies to control the spread of COVID-19 and, if not, then why? This paper explores various options and debates a number of policy alternatives. It explores what the biological borders of the COVID-19 virus mean to human communities in a context where immunization is not yet available. The arguments suggest focusing on counter-intuitive policy approaches that underscore the limited effectiveness of an international boundary line lockdown, as an effort to stop the virus spread. Border policies related to COVID-19 spread require novel thinking about borders and about the reach of health policies to control and eradicate the pandemic. Three public governance approaches are discussed in turn: Virus mitigation, Virus suppression, and Virus elimination. All three rely on individualising virus hosts from their communities, not entire communities from each other's: social distancing leads to mitigating policies;contact tracing leads to suppression, and quarantining, testing and surveillance to elimination. Neither requires the closure of the international boundary lines of a country but ‘elimination' that ultimately leads to a positioning of the ecological/biological border of the virus between two hosts. Indeed, with appropriate policy alignments constituencies may be able to implement biological boundaries within or across countries, cities or other regions of the world that are virus free. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Neo-Liberal Power: A Critical Analysis with Reference to Byung-Chul Han

The aim of this study is to put forward a critical analysis about the working of neo-liberal power in which we live with a specific reference to Byung Chul-Han. He claims that Foucault's consideration of bio-politics as a power which focuses on body falls behind to explain the relations of power in the contemporary neo-liberal order and the structure of individual and society. In order to overcome this shortcoming, Chul-Han claims that the power of neo-liberal order is a pschyo-politics which establishes its sovereignty by apply-ing pschyo-politic tools such as Big Data and therefore by influencing the hu-man soul. In this study, it is claimed that bio-politics hasn't gone out of the in-terest of power completely regarding the power practices during the process of Covid-19 pandemic which has continued over two years and that we don't wit-ness a power model in which only pschyo-politics works. In this regard, it is concluded that in the period in which we live, the power has a working which infleunces not only to the body but also to the soul and therefore which we can conceptualize as pschyo-somatics instead of the view of Foucault's bio-politics as Chul-Han understands or Chul-Han's psycho-politics.

Biopolitics After COVID: Notes from the Crisis

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of 'biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global history of populations' politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions.

Bodies in Transit: Speculation and the Biopolitical Imaginary

This essay explores the Bodies in Transit archive, an artifact of mid-nineteenth-century public health administration in New York City. The ledgers, which tracked the transit of every corpse that moved through the island of Manhattan between 1859 and 1894 and categorized entrants by their cause of death, nationality, and occupation, present a unique lens through which I explore the intersections of speculation, biopolitics, and urban space. I first establish a conceptual framework of "speculation" by dissecting its etymological genealogy, the roots of which share a preoccupation with vision and sight. I note that in practice, the ing and rationalizing tendencies of speculation operate by envisioning, calculating, and coercing specific outcomes into realization. I apply this framework to Bodies in Transit to historicize the ways in which biopolitics, the means through which the state forms, represents, and manages populations, are indexed to speculative economic practices. I read Bodies in Transit through the framework of speculation to articulate a field of meaning that illuminates the complex material and epistemic conditions surrounding its implementation and utility. As I argue, the ledgers were a response to the acceleration of real estate speculation in Manhattan, a trend that incentivized property owners to disinter burial grounds to relocate corpses to rural areas, and thereby connected the speculative logics of real estate to those of public health, spatial order, and surveillance. By thinking across and through the layered meanings of "speculation," this essay illuminates how the state's economy of knowledge is intimately related to biopolitical practices of surveillance and representations of financial value in the modern city.

Regulatory Competition, Coordination and Polity Convergence in the Covid Ecosystemic Crisis: A Policy Approach

The paper briefly sketches different "adaptations” possible to address the Covid crisis and then advances three possible avenues for future policy analysis of Covid-related measures, each of these avenues being based on a "conjecture”, respectively an evolutionary, a critical, and a cosmopolitan, and conjecture. The evolutionary conjecture implies regulatory transplants, the critical conjecture elicits competition of Covid-related measures, and the cosmopolitan conjecture assumes coordination of policies. The paper discusses how these conjectures based on pre-Covid literature could explain the regulatory dynamics and then asserts that growing evidence shows that regulatory measures appear to naturally lead to a "polity convergence” based on a common core of "Covid-biopower” and "Covid-biopolitics”. This convergence defies the initial expectations that the fragmented reactions to the Covid crisis could be explained by using the traditional research tools and also poses unprecedented critical issues that demand an expansion of the horizon of policy research.

Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History by Jaipreet Virdi (review)

The book begins with bacterial meningitis, an infection the author contracted in early childhood that left her with "profound-to-severe" hearing loss (Virdi, 7). Not only do we see her as a scholar in the archive, requesting permission to try a Victorian ear trumpet, we also see her as a child with her d/Deaf classmates, being fitted for hearing aids "as we squirmed and giggled when the wet silicone mold was injected into our ears," and as an adult, experiencing difficulty switching from analog to digital hearing aids (258). When Virdi's first pair of behindthe-ear hearing aids make her six-year-old ears stick out, and her hair "tied in a long braid as per the Sikh tradition, did little to disguise them," it is the hearing aids, not the braid, that provoke "snickers, puzzled glances, and finger-pointing from younger children" (18).

Pandemic modelling and model citizens: Governing COVID-19 through predictive models, sovereignty and discipline.

Pandemic modelling functions as a means of producing evidence of potential events and as an instrument of intervention that Tim Rhodes and colleagues describe as entangling science into social practices, calculations into materializations, abstracts into effects and models into society. This article seeks to show how a model society evinced through mathematical models produces a model not only for society but also for citizens, showing them how to act in a certain model manner that prevents an anticipated pandemic future. To this end, we analyse political speeches by various Norwegian ministers to elucidate how various model-based COVID-19 responses enact a 'model citizen'. Theoretically, we combine Rhodes et al.'s arguments with Foucault's concepts of law, discipline and security, thus showing what a model society might imply for the model citizen. Finally, we conclude that although the model society is largely informed by epidemiological models and liberal biopolitics that typically place responsibility on individual subjects, sovereign state power remains manifestly present in the speeches' rhetoric.

Transmission and territory: Urban bordering during COVID-19.

The governance of COVID-19 has involved the proliferation of territorial practices, through border controls designed to regulate movements not only across national and state borders, but also within cities and city regions. We argue that these urban territorial practices have been significant to the biopolitics of COVID-19 and warrant close scrutiny. Focusing on the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne, this paper offers critical analysis of the urban territorial practices of COVID-19 suppression, which we categorise as practices of closure, confinement and capacity control. We observe these practices in measures including 'stay at home' orders, residential building and housing estate lockdowns, closure of and capacity limits on non-residential premises, postcode- and municipality-level restrictions on movement, and hotel quarantine. These measures, we argue, have reinforced and at times exacerbated pre-existing social and spatial inequalities. However, we also recognise COVID-19's real and highly uneven threats to life and health, and therefore ask what a more egalitarian form of pandemic governance might look like. We draw on scholarly writing on 'positive' or 'democratic' biopolitics and 'territory from below', in order to outline some more egalitarian and democratic interventions that have been pursued to suppress viral transmission and to reduce vulnerability to COVID-19 and other viruses. This, we argue, is an imperative of critical scholarship as much as the critique of state interventions. Such alternatives do not necessarily reject state territorial interventions per se, but instead point towards a way of addressing the pandemic by recognising the capacity and legitimacy of biopolitics and territory from below. They point towards ways in which we might see a pandemic 'like a city' in a way that prioritises egalitarian care through a politics premised on democratic negotiations among diverse urban authorities and sovereignties.

Ambivalent thinking amid pandemic biopolitics

This review article surveys recent work in political theory that has brought together biopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Centered on 2021 books by Giorgio Agamben and Benjamin Bratton, the essay outlines prominent visions of "negative" (Agamben) and "positive" (Bratton) biopolitical responses to the pandemic, engages public reactions to these approaches, and reassesses the position of biopolitical thinking in light of these. In doing so, the article recalls the foundations and original interventions of biopolitical theory, calling for a renewed engagement with the perspectives afforded by biopolitics that pushes past the negative/positive binary. Ultimately, the essay gathers together major developments in biopolitical thinking today, counters moves to discard the theoretical approach despite the limitations of recent examples, and repositions biopolitics as an ambivalent tool for political thought and practice going forward.

Conclusion - Authority in the Chinese Border Regime

To contextualize recent developments, this book demonstrates how the Chinese border regime operates, specifically by differentiating its strategies of control according to a subject's geographic location (graduated sovereignty) and immigrant group (graduated citizenship). Following Ong, governmentality is shown to be territorialized in literal zones of exception. Further, the book demonstrates how authority over state territory is graduated: the regime rearticulates the border on both a regional and a local scale through establishing Special Border Zones that provide preferential policies, exceptional immigration procedures, and additional resources to integrate the local economy and facilitate crossborder trade. The border regime can also be shown to create metaphorical zones of exception if the border is understood as biopolitical as well as geopolitical.

Governed bodies, discarded bodies: Notes for an analysis of contemporary migrations during Covid-19

This article presents the results of an ethnographic research conducted in the northern border of Mexico from 2019 to 2021, specifically in the city of Tijuana. The objective of this article is to analyse the role of bodies in border and migration management with special emphasis on the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. To do so, I focus on three situations. First is the case of migrants whose bodies are exploited in the precarious work opportunities they find along Mexico's northern border. Second, I look at migrants who experience detention and confinement in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) detention centres in the United States. And third, I analyse the situation of missing migrants whose bodies are sought by family members and numerous collectives in Mexico. Through the analysis of these situations, the article demonstrates that by using ‘bodies' as a productive category for analysing migration and the containment of migratory movements, we can understand both the resulting negative effects on migrants' subjectivity and bodies and how migrants respond to and challenge the global migration system. © The Author(s) 2023.

Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)

On 26 November 2022, prompted by a deadly fire in a high-rise apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, protesters took to streets and university campuses across China calling for an end to the country's restrictive ‘zero Covid' policy (清零政策) (Davidson and Yu 2022). With its zero-Covid policy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has attempted to position itself as the polar opposite of governments in the West and the United States in particular—as a biopolitical state that ‘deploys its governing techniques in the name of defending the security of life against external threats' (L.G. 2022: 139), which represents a centralised technocracy starkly distinct from the class-based revolutionary politics of the Mao Zedong era. [...]the emergence of the much more transmissible Omicron variant of the virus, the Chinese Government successfully mobilised the population, state, and economy in a concerted effort to suppress transmission through newly developed surveillance technologies aimed at systematically mapping, tracking, and containing the population. In their recent book on the pandemic, What World is This?, Judith Butler (2022) argues that the normalisation of deaths due to Covid-19 means the acceptance of a percentage of the population as disposable—or a society in which ‘mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order' (Lincoln 2021: 46). If it is a natural disaster, the party appears as the saviour;human-made catastrophes, on the other hand, raise questions about responsibility and point to broader systemic issues.

Three policy problems: biocreep and the extension of biopolitical administration

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of ‘biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of ‘biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a ‘problematic subject';secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction;and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The role of transnational churches in response to Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis in South Africa

Coronavirus (COVID-19) has caused unprecedented suffering and death among the people of South Africa. The epidemic is associated with great fear experienced by the infected, affected and the general population. This article focuses on the role played by South African transnational churches in response to the COVID-19 crises and measures taken by the government. The article is anchored on Foucault's theory of biopolitics in which he explains the emergence ofnew political strategies implemented to regulate the lives of the species being. Foucault's account as applied to the context of this article serves as an overture to his depiction of panopticism as a system of governance. In South Africa, the haunting memory of COVID-19 and the chaos associated with it has paved the way for 'biopolitics' as a system of constant surveillance to citizens and transnational churches. Stringent lockdown regulations have been implemented in this regard after COVID-19 was declared a national disaster. A qualitative research method and an interpretivist research paradigm were adopted. Data was collected using telephone interviews with 5 transnational churches located in Durban. Key findings show that transnational churches in Durban have adhered to lockdown regulations in multifarious ways. They have continued with the theology of ministry in an attempt to replace the message of fear with the message of hope. Many have recommended their congregants to stay at home and attend church services via radio and online live streaming. It recommends religion be accommodated and coexistence with scientific knowledge systems in fighting the pandemic. Science, biomedical and clinical approach is not enough to explain the behavior and illness of human beings.