PROXEMICS, COVID-19, AND THE ETHICS OF CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA

Who We Test For: Aligning Relational and Public Health Responsibilities in COVID-19 Testing in Scotland

COVID-19 testing programs in the UK often called on people to test to "protect others." In this article we explore motivations to test and the relationships to "others" involved in an asymptomatic testing program at a Scottish university. We show that participants engaged with testing as a relational technology, through which they navigated multiple overlapping responsibilities to kin, colleagues, flatmates, strangers, and to more diffuse publics. We argue that the success of testing as a technique of governance depends not only on the production of disciplined selves, but also on the program's capacity to align interpersonal and public scales of responsibility.

Compounded Caregiving: Mexican Women in Migrant-Sending Families During COVID-19

Based on qualitative interviews conducted remotely with twenty-five women heads of migrant-sending households in rural Mexico, we examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender inequities in caregiving and social reproduction. Taking medical anthropology's call to attend to the disparate impacts of the pandemic along lines of existing social inequities and vulnerabilities, we describe how women navigated interruptions to remittance flows, social distancing and stay-at-home orders, and the shift to remote schooling for their children, and how all of these transformations compounded women's caregiving responsibilities and negatively impacted their health and well-being.

'Loob' and 'labas': Spatial constructions of safety and risk amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines

This article argues that local constructions of risky and safe spaces, as articulated by the notions 'loob' (inside) and 'labas' (outside), informed popular and political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, leading to an overemphasis on staying at home and, conversely, a general avoidance or fear of outdoor spaces that was at times reinforced by public health authorities. Practices and policies related to the pandemic response rendered this binary opposition between 'loob' and 'labas' visible, from regulations concerning the use of personal protective equipment to restrictions of access to outdoor spaces. While this emergent form of bodily proxemics was contested and negotiated over time, its tenacity throughout the pandemic underscores the importance of understanding how people spatialize risk in times of health crises.

Paradoxes of pandemic infection control: Proximity, pace and care within and beyond SARS-CoV-2

From the adoption of mask-wearing in public settings to the omnipresence of hand-sanitising, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has brought unprecedented cultural attention to infection prevention and control (IPC) in everyday life. At the same time, the pandemic threat has enlivened and unsettled hospital IPC processes, fracturing confidence, demanding new forms of evidence, and ultimately involving a rapid reassembling of what constitutes safe care. Here, drawing on semi-structured interviews with 63 frontline healthcare workers from two states in Australia, interviewed between September 2020 and March 2021, we illuminate some of the affective dimensions of IPC at a time of rapid change and evolving uncertainty. We track how a collective sense of risk and safety is relationally produced, redefining attitudes and practices around infective risk, and transforming accepted paradigms of care and self-protection. Drawing on Puig de la Bellacasa's formulation, we propose the notion of IPC as a multidimensional matter of care. Highlighting the complex negotiation of space and time in relation to infection control and care illustrates a series of paradoxes, the understanding of which helps illuminate not only how IPC works, in practice, but also what it means to those working on the frontline of the pandemic.

NECROPOLITICS VERSUS BIOPOLITICS: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic

Anthropologists have used Michel Foucault's thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. Yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. The arrests, killings of unarmed Blacks by police, COVID-19 racial health inequities, and the January 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats Black bodies as expendable. By critiquing the facile overuse of biopolitics and biopower, this article also speaks to what COVID-19 uncovered within the academy.