Editors Paul Martin, Stevienna de Saille, Kirsty Liddiard and Warren Pearce have given us an excellent new collection of essays with fresh, global perspectives on the sociology and politics of the pandemic. The book focuses on what COVID-19 has revealed about social relations, how it has reshaped them, and how we understand and experience being human in this context. It is short and accessible, containing seventeen chapters of fewer than ten pages each, but packed with research and analysis. The contributors represent a community of scholars and practitioners connected to the Institute for the Study of the Human, iHuman, based in the Social Sciences faculty of the University of Sheffield. This Institute brings together science and technology studies (STS) and critical disability studies (CDS) and positions its work within the field of critical posthumanities, broadly conceived as a scholarly and political project interrogating conventional assumptions about the meanings and understandings of being human. As Paul Martin and co-editors tell us, their aim is “to create a safe space for genuine cross-disciplinary conversations and [to] promote experimental methods, theories and new ways of working together,” in pursuit of greater equality and diversity, community engagement, and the development of the next generation scholars to bring “real world change” (p. 9). In the increasingly crowded world of pandemic studies, this volume stands out for its commitment to social justice and a “more human future,” demonstrated by authors’ critical examination of biomedical and neoliberal policies and politics and emphasis on innovative, intersectional perspectives. It will be appreciated by an audience of academics and students across the sciences and social sciences and by researchers, campaigners, and professionals involved in advocacy, public policy, and service provision.
Part one, “Knowing Humans,” focuses on the role of scientific and technologic knowledge in representations and experiences of COVID-19. The first chapter, “Making Models into Public Objects” by Rokia Ballo and Warren Pearce, addresses social and political issues related to the lack of democratic accountability inherent in technocratic governance. Critically examining the use of models to develop pandemic policies in the UK, the authors show how big data and statistical tools are imbued with “the same assumptions and biases that help maintain social inequalities” (15). They offer the solution of turning models into “public objects” to enable citizens involvement in their interpretation and use. It’s an idea that recalls participatory budgeting and that could be expanded to encourage more critical assessment of “evidence based” policy making more broadly in terms of how it constructs knowledge entangled with existing systems of power and oppression. This is followed by Brigitte Nerlich’s chapter that explores the use of metaphors for human confrontation with COVID-19 and how they present different ways of understanding our social relations. Nerlich shows us that some leaders used discourses that envisioned citizens as connected, cooperative, and coming together in the pandemic, humanizing all of us, while others evoked war and invasion, stoking racism and xenophobia. She suggests that former humanize us and should be celebrated or expanded. In the next chapter Camilla Mørk Røstvik and co-authors focus on the knowledge communicated by visual metaphors used in the pandemic. They argue that we should be cautious about how we interpret one-dimensional images because they risk flattening us, problematically concealing inequalities and hierarchies. Stefania Vicari and Zheng Yang then compare how experiences of the pandemic are expressed on the Chinese digital platform Weibo with those on Twitter, showing that state policies and values “play a key role in shaping our understandings of public health” (42). As a result, they call for further research and greater reflection on the power dynamics embedded in social media platforms. Finally, Carlos Cuevas-Garcia’s chapter uses the experience of wedding planning during the pandemic to analyze national policy responses and individualized risk management in a globally interconnected world.
Part Two develops the theme of “Marginalized Humans.” Here authors are especially concerned with exclusion and inequality connected to disabilities, and how people experienced disability during the pandemic. Each chapter integrates an intersectional perspective, demonstrating how social science research can apply it effectively to expose interlocking systems of power. First, Dan Goodley and Katherine Runswick-Cole focus on the position of disabled, poor and Black people, hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19 because of “years of systemic racism, toxic capitalism and austere funding of health education and social care” (53). Writing in the context lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter marches of 2020, the authors show that poor, Black and disabled people were more likely to be isolated in inadequate housing, facing heightened existential risks and finding themselves cut off from services already insufficient following decades of cuts. The authors call on us to understand the meaning of human existence through a relational and sociological lens that emphasizes interconnectedness, implicating us all in the precarity and dehumanizing daily realities they document. The chapter that follows is based on research from a larger project co-produced by Kirsty Liddiard, Runswick-Cole, Goodley and a co-researcher collective of young disabled people who share their experiences of living through the pandemic. Their accounts echo the title: “Why would I go to hospital if it’s not going to try to save me?” With grim resignation the young people recognize that, if they get sick, clinical guidelines will classify them as highly frail and de-prioritize their treatment. In response to such a “deeply troubling measurement of human worth” (62), the team engages in “discursive activism,” asserting the value of all lives and challenging policies of inhuman austerity. Poonam Pandey and Aviram Sharma then critically analyze scientific advice given to the public in India during the pandemic. In their case, the “state-science complex” speaks to a public imagined as monolithic and unified. As a result, it fails to recognize the needs of poor and vulnerable groups, and then refuses demands for support, leading to further marginalization to those already worst off. Tanya Titchkosky rounds out this section with an examination of pandemic satire that denigrates disabled people, reinforcing hierarchies of human worth. Like the other essays, it demonstrates the power of a critical intersectional lens to expose and denaturalize dehumanizing constructs that have enabled states and society to see certain people as “disposable” while bolstering the privileges of others.
In Part Three, “Biosocial Humans,” authors take up issues of biomedical constructions of humans and their implications in the context of COVID-19. Paul Martin’s chapter looks at changes in public health linked to the UK’s emergence as global leader in genomics investment. While he recognizes that this may lead to important benefits for society, he shows that it has already created urgent ethical, social, and political issues. Among these are the expansion of surveillance, exploitation of personal information, increased commercialization of the NHS and the reallocation of resources towards profit-making companies. More fundamentally, it has acceleration of the shift away from thinking of health in terms of social and political determinants towards understanding it as individual and biological. As these forces are widening inequalities in health, wealth, life and death, Martin calls for tying genetic medicine to a broader vision of human wellbeing grounded in our social arrangements. Dawn Goodwin and coauthors then return to the concept of “frailty” and how it has been used during the pandemic to identify certain individuals with bodily risks that obscure that they are “structured by cumulative disadvantage” (97). Rod Michalko picks up these themes in an autoethnography of the experience of disability, ageing, and blindness in the pandemic. Memorably, he tells us how his person has been reduced to “a site of vulnerability,” his “life barely worth living” (108). Ros Williams’s stellar final chapter of this part focuses on one way that biomedicine, specifically in-person specimen collection to identify stem cell donors, brought humanizing experiences of community until the arrival of COVID-19. In this case, the pandemic has resulted in the loss of health and social benefits linked to shared biology within racialized and minoritized groups.
The final part brings together four chapters and a conclusion to reflect on the means of creating a more equal, inclusive, and sustainable future. For Keren Naa Abeka Arthur and coauthors, the pandemic demonstrated the possibilities for new forms of cooperation and (re)production, from local health insurance programs in Malawi to volunteer-organized home delivery in Italy. They call for “(re)-positioning” the human within a future economy of “responsible stagnation” in place of profits and growth, recalling the concept of “degrowth.” Michael Morrison echoes Paul Martin’s chapter in envisioning a future where gene editing is situated in an ethics of collective needs rather than individual choice. Anna Pilson’s chapter argues for reimagining inclusive education by drawing on lessons learned in the pandemic about the importance of flexibility, relationality, and process to fully value the capacities of children. Paul Graham Raven’s chapter takes a broader view by arguing that a more human future must finally reject neoliberal ideology. Instead of Thatcher’s insistence that There Is No Alternative (TINA), Raven urges us to recognize that There Are Many Alternatives (TAMA) and that we can create a new reality through what he calls a “utopian praxis.” Finally, the editors conclude by returning to themes addressed throughout the book and by urging us to use the pandemic moment as a turning point in which we, as a global collective, can and must live differently to build a world that values and supports all of us.
This collection has many strengths. It stands out for demonstrating the value of collaborations across disciplines and for presenting so many new insights on the pandemic’s interaction with structural inequalities and the multifaceted implications for excluded and marginalized communities. Many of the essays are especially notable for centering the experiences of disabled people, and for giving us innovative, critical, and intersectional research designs and conceptual frameworks to draw on going forward. The authors give us nuanced analyses, emphasizing that recent developments in biomedicine, and its collision with COVID-19, has disrupted, challenged, and reinforced social arrangements, simultaneously dividing and uniting us, positioning some of us as “more human” while dehumanizing others. They offer many visions of, and possibilities for, a more just and human future. If the volume has a weakness, it is that there is little space for developing specific policies and practices. Nevertheless, three years into the pandemic, and in the context of climate crisis, war, the persistence of austerity, and the continuing threat of far-right movements, this book and its messages are more important to read than ever and deserve our sustained attention.