297B2

SoSe 21: Global Health and Pandemic Life-Worlds

Nasima Selim

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Course Description: How do pandemic realities affect (more than) human lifeworlds? This course discusses everyday life entanglements with pandemics with critical global health perspectives. Popular health discourses/practices in the global North often perpetuate geographical, epistemic, and biosocial distance from pandemics by situating infectious diseases elsewhere, either in the global South or among marginalized social groups. However, Covid-19, the recent most pandemic, has affected (more than) human lifeworlds at an unprecedented scale. In addition to the enormous loss of lives and chronic morbidity, conspiracy theories proliferate in the face of rising uncertainty while pre-existing structural inequalities and racist ideologies intensify. Microbes, non-humans (and other humans) are imagined to be only threats to humanity. The course invites postgraduate students to engage with entangled histories of pandemics, actor-centered and multispecies ethnographic case studies to situate and understand pandemic lifeworlds better. Key References Singer, Merrill. 2014. “Zoonotic Ecosyndemics and Multispecies Ethnography.” Anthropological Quarterly 87 (4): 1279-1309. Mbembe, Achille. 2021. “The Universal Right to Breathe.” Critical Inquiry 47: 58-62. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/711437 close