ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the citizenship of both nationals and non-nationals. We define citizenship as a contested membership among all populations within the territory of a state, encompassing the status, rights, and performativity of the people. We look at changes in the citizenship of non-nationals, particularly the most vulnerable: undocumented migrants. Despite long-standing discrimination against undocumented migrants, the COVID-19 pandemic compelled the South Korean government to reconsider its policies on their citizenship rights. The government provided free tests and treatments, and free vaccinations to the undocumented migrants who had long been ignored in South Korea. It also suspended immigration crackdowns and deportations. While these COVID-19 preventive measures were intended to address community safety, they also affected the multifaceted nature of citizenship by making everybody within the territory both the subject and object of quarantine. Do these measures indicate an expansion of South Korean citizenship to include undocumented migrants? We discuss what implications the South Korean government’s pandemic-response policies may have for citizenship. With the increasing elasticity of citizenship boundaries in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, we claim that territorial aspects have been given greater emphasis in the politics of South Korean citizenship. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Can psychology be defined "only" as a health profession? The presence of psychology in health contexts is indispensable, but reducing it to this presence is inappropriate and impossible;in fact, "objects", "issues" and "contexts" relevant to health are not reducible to the health system and seem to require multidisciplinary and multisectoral approaches. Covid-19 makes it clear that a sectoral view is insufficient to address the devastating impact on society;Covid- 19 represents a challenge that seems to require a reorientation to a psychology which, while dutifully exercising an action to support individual traumas and frailties, cannot afford to reduce its presence and ability to intervene to. It is also along these problematic nuclei that a reterritorialization of psychology develops;in this way, through a not short process of revisiting the epistemological and methodological foundations of the practices and operationalities typical of the profession, psychology can assume a role of autonomous presence and influence in the system of health and social services. We therefore appeal to the Postgraduate Schools in Health Psychology to recognize themselves in the task of guiding this necessary transition towards a full transformative responsibility for psychology. © 2021 Franco Angeli Edizioni. All rights reserved.