Care for the Polis

Listening to Covid-19: Oral Histories of New York in Pandemic

Denise Milstein — 2020-09-23

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Denise Milstein, Director MA Program in Sociology, Columbia University

Ryan Hagen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sociology, Columbia University

The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest infectious disease crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918, and we fear that it will not be the last. This panel will feature the work we are developing with a team of sociologists, oral historians, and anthropologists at Columbia University’s INCITE and the Oral History Archives at Columbia to archive and document New York City’s experience of the pandemic.

New York City was the early epicenter of this pandemic in the United States because of its international connections and the local density of its social and urban life. The virus spreads most intensely in households, workplaces, and neighborhoods. In this panel, we will explain some of the early oral histories we conducted as the pandemia hit hard in the Spring and Summer of 2020 and the conclusions drawn from them thereafter. Our growing archive focuses on New York—a city of neighborhoods—to illuminate and document the social and urban structure of the pandemic. We will discuss the particular methods of oral history, the role of storytelling and diary writing in public experiences of health, and how this form of social research and humanistic reflection can help us understand relationships between health, the city, and social inequity—relationships made ever so urgent in times of pandemia and uniquely captured in the voices of those who lived through the period.

Speaking of Covid-19, Now and in the Future

Rita Charon — 2020-06-25

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Event Video:

Rita Charon, Educating for Ethics in the Time of Covid

This presentation will begin by summarizing the complex ethical training necessary to provide to clinicians and student-clinicians in the time of Covid. Topics to be itemized include confidentiality, patient dignity, personal safety, moral distress, and fairness in triage decisions. Within this vast territory, specific issues for students will be emphasized in this presentation: How can students early in training process their own experiences in the pandemic? How can they learn—and what do they learn—from living through the pandemic? What are the ethical boundaries around an author’s right to publish “reflections” that describe particular patients or that collapse several patients into a “fictional” one?

Margaret Crosby-Arnold, Toward New Age Poleis: Faith and Peace of Peacefully Moving On

Despite repeated alterations across Modern History (1775-2019), the modern republic — the brainchild of the Modern Revolutionary Era (1775-1848) — is a polis that from its inception seems never to have been able to live up to its promises to humanity. In large measure, this is because it drew a distinction between a human and a person and its ‘inclusive’ notion of ‘the people’ was restricted to ‘persons.’ It isn’t so much that the ‘promises’ of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or liberty, equality and fraternity were almost immediately betrayed, both willfully and unwittingly, but, rather that these poleis were themselves reactionary reactions against the migration, social mobility and diversity that characterized late-early-modern globalization. These modern poleis are not suffering from dysfunctions that can be fixed, but are, in fact, functioning, fully, according to exclusive design. For this reason, alterations toward greater equality and inclusion have proven, consistently, to be short-term appeasements and expedients that lull human opposition for the buying of time and, therefore, facilitate the adaptation and reconstitution of exclusivity.

Accordingly, this paper will be in three parts. The first section will offer a historical analysis of what is discussed above. The second will suggest that the recent crisis have catapulted us out of a now past epoch into a New Age and that, as scary and formidable as this may seem, that is offers an opportunity for sustainable liberation from the failings of the modern poleis and a chance to form just poleis, capable of securing and sustaining life, liberty, safety, pursuit of happiness and fraternity the humankind that make-up a given polis. Paradoxically, the crisis of 2020 have left us as free as the founders of modernity once were to comb the histories of bygone ages — including the Modern one — and pick and choose what to throw-off and what to retain in altered form. Finally, as a result of this great catapulting, our choices are no longer the binary of “to alter” or “abolish,” but rather we can envision, define and strategically effect a course of transition to New Age Poleis. Rather than committing more time to attempting to make a Diesel engine run on regular unleaded fuel, we may want to begin thinking about a more human environmentally friendly vessel that wants to carry us all.

Recommended Reading:

Margaret Crosby-Arnold, "A case of hidden genocide? Disintegration and destructon of people of color in Napoleonic Europe, 1799-1815." https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14788810.2017.1330499. This article is one of four chosen to represent Atlantic Studies: Global Currents on a new website, "Scholarship Supporting hte Fight Against Racism and Inequality," created by the publisher Taylor & Francis. Congratulations to the author on this honor!

Ethics of Care and Space

Kathryn Tabb — 2020-06-18

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Event Video:

Kathryn Tabb, Can Precision Medicine Care for the Polis?

A recent vogue in medicine has been for “precision”. This new paradigm for medicine, also referred to as “personalized” medicine, promises to particularize patient care to the sensitivities of each of our bodies, which we ourselves may or may not be aware of, by identifying rare genetic variants and other biomarkers of disease. While advocates of precision medicine often characterize it in opposition to traditional practices and methods that are vague, careless or nonspecific, I argue that the true opponent of precision medicine — that is, the sort of medicine that stands to lose the most by its ascendency — is general medicine. And this, I believe, should concern us. General medicine is the application of public health knowledge to individual people, and it relies not on new discoveries of biomechanisms and genotypes, but on traditional methods for tracking epidemiological trends and characterizing large-scale social and environmental determinants of health. General medicine is, in other words, a medicine for the polis. Yet the funding of public medicine is increasingly channeled towards precision. In 2015, President Obama introduced an initiative in precision medicine — called the “All of Us” Initiative — to gather a one-million person cohort that could supply the “big data" required for this revolution in medical knowledge. This rhetorical choice captures the complexity of the precision medicine movement, which simultaneously promises a new kind of individualized care even as it appeals to our collective impulses in order to use our personal information for discoveries that likely won’t benefit us personally. Even before the pandemic, there were clear ethical costs of favoring precise over general medicine; I explore some that have manifested in mental healthcare, before turning to the tragic evidence that the abandonment of general medicine has exacerbated the current crisis.

Joy Knoblauch, When is Social Distance? Simmel, Park, Bogardus, Hall, or After

In the United States, the term social distancing was suddenly everywhere in early March of 2020. In a piece for the architecture and urbanism community, Stephen Legg called social distancing “the breakout vocabulary of the 'outbreak narrative'.” But what does the term mean and what strategies or ideologies does it reflect? Rather than ask how far social distance goes, I will consider a few historical moments when social distance has been and is used to think anew and redeploy social tactics. Historians have started to contextualize COVID-19 within the history of spatial practices to prevent infection. These are important histories of epidemic. But there is something ugly about the term social distance, as pointed out by a recent article by Lily Scherlis covering the racial and class history of the term. As a historian of architecture, I will situate what Scherlis lays out in light of spatial and urban practices. Rather than ask where the term comes from, I will trace moments in the history of the term that are applicable as we think about caring for the cities of the near future. I will particualrly draw insights from Georg Simmel circa 1908, the Chicago School of Sociology and Robert Ezra Park of the 1920s, Edward T. Hall's distinction between “social distance” and intimate distance in the 1960s, and from the use of the term circa 2004-2009 for pandemic planning. In so doing, I'll ask when the term has refered to the elites keeping themselves apart from society and whenit has signaled a spatial practice that threatened to rupture public social bonds.

Reader:

Stephen Legg, “Who's New to Social Distancing?” Platform, April 20, 2020

Lily Scherlis, "Distantiated Communities. A Social History of Social Distancing" Cabinet April 30, 2020

Speaking of Worlds Without Police

Maria Gonzalez Pendas — 2020-06-12

This panel is part of the Uptown People’s Assembly: Facing the Raging Pandemic host by the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. For twelve running hours, this assembly brings together artists working in all disciplines, arts professionals, and scholars to moderate a durational event of art, testimony and conversation with a focus on our current compounding crises: the coronavirus and the civil unrest decrying the racist killings of Black people by police officers. Both community members and the general public are invited to speak and participate in this event. More information and registration HERE.

Event Video:

Uptown People's Assembly: Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities from Wallach Art Gallery on Vimeo.

Speaking of Worlds Without Police, an improptu panel of Care for the Polis, will give an overview of the series and of the arguments it has so far offered on the promises and injustices of health and so-called public systems, and the contentious but also possibly emancipatory power of the notion of care. Our presentation will lay out one the main premise of the series in its current form, namely, on the value of humanistic thinking to generate ideas amidst the urgency of the times—as in the current collision of a health crisis, the foreclosure of the public sphere, and the emergence of a social movement that calls forth systemic changes to the way we police, think about, care for, and design our polis. To unleash such new imagination, we will hear from our guest moderator Professor Amy Chazkel on her writing on “Worlds Without Police,” from the recently edited special issue of Radical History Review on "Policing, Justice, and the Radical Imagination.” Following, we will open up a discussion for audience members to share experiences and spaces of care that fall outside of institutional frameworks of policing and care—from autonomous urban enclaves and caregiving by the stoop to secret-sharing around kitchen tables—a prompt to together reflect on what past and current worlds without police look like and how we can imagine such worlds shaping a more just and healthier future.

Toxic Bodies in Place

Samia Henni — 2020-06-11

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Samia Henni, French Nuclear Toxicity in the Sahara

On February 13, 1960, in the midst of the Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), the French colonial regime detonated its first over ground atomic bomb at Reggane in the Algerian Sahara Desert. Codenamed “Gerboise Bleue” (Blue Jerboa), it had a blast capacity of 70 kilotons, about 4 times the strength of LittleBoy, the United States’ atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima a month before the end of the Second World War. Blue Jerboa was followed by other atmospheric detonations, as well as various underground nuclear tests, which continued until 1966, four years after Algeria’s formal independence from France. With these toxic imprints, France became the fourth country to possess weapons for mass destruction after the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the United Kingdom. However, France's nuclear program in the Sahara spread radioactive fallout across Algeria, North, Central and West Africa, and the Mediterranean (including southern Europe), causing irreversible contaminations among humans, natural and built environments. This paper exposes the toxicity of the norms and forms of this program, including the classification of its very sources.

Fig: Preparation works for “Gerboise Bleue,” Centre saharien d’expérimentations militaires (CSEM, or Saharan Center for Military Experiments), Reggane, Algerian Sahara (January 1960) © Raymond Varoqui / SCA / ECPAD.

Chisomo Kalinga, Narrative Stories: Understanding HIV & AIDS Among Peri-Urban Citizens of Malawi

Expanding Ecologies of Care

Rachel Adams — 2020-06-04

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Event Video:

Rachel Adams, Care Beyond the Human

Taken from the coda to a book about the aesthetics and politics of care, this short presentation will explore the possibilities and perils of extending human care relations to other species, the environment, and non-living matter. It isn’t hard to imagine caring for a beloved dog, a retired horse, a fluffy baby seal, or even a giant redwood. But I wonder how far outward different theoretical models of care extend, and how they are changed when the agent is a flatworm, a mushroom, slime mold, or a robot? Is care itself an anthropocentric concept that always requires imagining the other possessed of human motivations, agency, and emotional depth? And if not, what are the driving motivations involved in such caring activity? I consider a series of artistic and social experiments with extra-human care as I seek to better understand the contours of such an expansion, as well as the place of the human in care networks that include other species and non-human actors.

Bryony Roberts, Structures of Care: Experimental Models of Childcare

This presentation considers how intersectional feminism can inform experimental models of childcare. As the current pandemic makes especially visible, the issue of childcare is entangled with inequities of gender, race, and class. Childcare is a social justice issue that is gaining visibility in politics but remains overlooked in the fields of architecture and urbanism, despite the role of design in shaping conditions of education and care. There is, however, a historical lineage and growing number of contemporary design projects that demonstrate how architectural experimentation in tandem with radical socioeconomic models of care can improve access, affordability, and education with or without governmental support. This presentation draws from research on programmatic hybridization: how combining childcare plus housing, childcare plus parental workplace, and childcare plus landscape, can improve conditions for care workers, children, and families.

Urban Infrastructures of Violence

Amy Chazkel — 2020-05-28

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Event Video:

Amy Chazkel, "For the Love of the Public": Urban Community and a Stay-at-Home Order in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland

From guns to night-time lighting, this panel turns to the effect that infrastructures of policing and violence have on the shape of the polis and, in the context of the Americas, on the racial ideologies that define it. Speakers will examine how urban space and its supposed rural other engender forms of what we might call “anti-care," including violence, in the contexts of 19th-century Brazil and contemporary United States.

Collectives of Care

Meredith TenHoor — 2020-05-21

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Event Video:

Camille Robcis, Institutional Psychotherapy and Institutional Analysis in 1960s France

Meredith TenH oor, Architectures of Care: French Theories and Institutions circa 1968

[Nicole Sonolet, Diagrams of sociability groupings for the clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.]

How did the practice of institutional psychotherapy develop, and how has it contributed to our understanding of the spaces and practices necessary for the institutions of care, and to our concepts of a city designed to deliver care? Together, these two papers will discuss the emergence of institutional psychotherapy in Spain and France in the 1960s and 70s, with a focus on the St. Alban clinic, and theories of “collective facilities,” or social care amenities planned and theorized by the French collective CERFI (the Center for Institutional Studies, Research and Training) and the architect Nicole Sonolet. In these contexts philosophers Michel Foucault, Anne Querrien, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze developed now well-known philosophies of power, infrastructure, and the subject that were heavily influenced by their work to provide, design, and theorize spaces of care. Speakes will narrate this moment in urban and intellectual history in order to together discuss how it can inform present debates about theories and practices of care.

Forms of Urban and Medical Exclusion

Alexandre White — 2020-05-14

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Event Video:

Leslie Topp, From Seclusion to Self-Isolation: Uses and Perils of the Single Room

This paper will address the history of the design of seclusion and isolation in psychiatric and prison contexts, with a focus on the single room and its deployment and representation also in a range of non-carceral contexts such as domestic, working, and academic environments The current crisis has taught us much about isolation, its uses and perils. It has also shone a bright light on spatial inequality in the range of assumptions at play in public health advice about what kind of spaces and isolation possibilities most people have or should have access to, and how far short of that assumed norm many people’s accommodation falls. This paper will showcase historical research on past single rooms to also engages with current conditions and experiences of lockdown.

Reader:

Masha Gessen, "Why Psychiatric Wards Are Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus," The New Yorker, April 20 2020

Jason DeParle, "The Coronavirus Class Divide: Space and Privacy," New York Times, April 12 2020

Tom Wall, "Cramped living conditions may be accelerating UK spread of coronavirus," The Guardian, April 12 2020

Alexandre White, Epidemic Imaginaries: Disease and the Redrawing of the Polis

The most sustained research into acute epidemics such as recent epidemics of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo, zika virus, or yellow fever epidemics most often arise in the fuzzy domain of Global Health research which focuses by in large upon the concerns and health problems occurring in the developing world. This leaves spaces like Europe and North America outside of the realm of direct analysis save for migrant populations, and the international organizations and geopolitical entities involved in health policy making. Epidemics of these diseases, disproportionately having far greater effects outside the over-developed West than within highlight a myth of the yawning gaps between modernity and the ‘uncivilized’ rest of the world. This paper examines how the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the modern west from the myth of its own technical and scientific superiority in the face of plagues. The history of international infectious disease control and regulation has largely been one in which powerful imperial or European and North American nations have held themselves up as the exemplars of sanitation, health and hygiene at risk from a backwards rest of the world. In this paper we will look at the formulation of this myth and the factors that have shaped its legacy in the domain of infectious disease control and the regulation of bodies in international space.

Emergency by Design

Graham Mooney — 2020-05-07

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Event Video:

Graham Mooney, Moving the patient-passenger: cities, ambulances, and emergency medical care in the later 20th century

Garden, R. S. 1972. The war of the roads. Injury 4, no. 2:109-123.

Recent research by Andrew Simpson and Anne Merritt has pointed to the important contribution of ambulances to the establishment of emergency medicine as a medical subspecialty from the 1960s in the United States. A great deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic was devoted to transporting victims of road traffic accidents safely and quickly to the locations of emergency care, reflecting much broader anxieties about motor car use as a social problem. For the most part, this concern was framed as a dimension of urban inequality in that it adversely impacted city dwellers, where the levels of traffic congestion tended to be most acute. This paper draws on insights from critical mobilities studies to examine how physicians, ambulance service managers, and urban health planners sought to overcome obstacles to the efficient transport of accident victims that were posed by complex urban infrastructures. Proposed solutions in the US and Europe included investing in dedicated communication systems between ambulances and emergency rooms, building centralized control centers, manipulating traffic flow technologies in real time, the use of helicopter ambulances, and the deployment of mobile emergency rooms. Some of these solutions were more concretely realized than others, but in this paper each will be interpreted in two ways. First, they were an attempt to reconcile the various demands of two kinds of infrastructure (i.e. health and transport). Second, they were constitutive of a nascent spatio-temporal emergency medicine rhetoric whereby “pre-hospital” care was explicitly contrasted to the “definitive” care provided in hospital.

Respondent: Rishi Goyal, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Medicine, Literature and Society (Columbia University)

Germ City Exhibition: A Conversation on Cities, Health, and Public Humanities

Rebecca Hayes Jacobs — 2020-05-01

This event will take place as a public Zoom panel starting at 3:00 pm EDT. Please REGISTER HERE in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Event Video:

[Jacob A. (Jacob August) Riis (1849-1914). [Infirmary.] ca. 1890. Museum of the City of New York 90.13.2.322.]

Humans and microbes have always co-habited, and their relationship has had a profound influence on human history—especially in cities, the crossroads of the movements of people, goods, and germs. Dr. Rebecca Hayes Jacobs will discuss her work as co-curator of Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis, a 2018 exhibition at the City Museum of New York that explored the complex story of the city's long battle against infectious disease—a fight involving government, urban planners, medical professionals, businesses, and activists. Planned to mark the centennial of the Spanish Flu pandemic, the show was organized in collaboration with The New York Academy of Medicine and Wellcome as part of the latter's international project Contagious Cities, a multi-city research and public humanities porject that explored the interplay of people and pathogens in urban contexts.

In conversation with Arden Hegele, Medical Humanities Fellows at SoF/Heyman, and María González Pendás, Coordinator of the Public Humanities Initiative at SoF/Heyman, Dr. Hayes Jacobs will address ways in which the Humanities can deploy civically engaged research and media platforms to help us better understand—and publically discuss—the complex relations between disease, cities, and their publics.