Yasmeen Arif

The workshop titled “The Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid: Reflections and Futures” is part of an interdisciplinary and international project spread across Asia, Europe and North America. This project brings together anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers for a series of experimentally collaborative workshops to investigate how the pandemic changed perceptions of illness, health, science, and ethics, while reconfiguring relationalities between doctors and patients, institutions and subjects, among neighbors and communities, and in politics and governance. Amplifying the title of the workshop, a number of participants outside academia – first responders, bureaucrats and administrators, aid and support personnel, creative artists – will engage with the core team of anthropologists and philosophers in guided and themed points of conversations. The Delhi workshop is a midpoint between two others in Salerno, Italy and NYC, US. By situating this workshop in the Global South and engaging with scholars and others working there, it challenges the Global North perspective that continues to dominate accounts of the pandemic. In Delhi, the workshop will build a platform that is able to engage multiple professional spaces, so as to learn and think, ground up, with unusual disciplinary collaboration and geographical imagination.