2020 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Care for the Polis: Forms of Urban and Medical Exclusion (5.14.20)

Topp, Leslie; White, Alexandre

Leslie Topp showcases historical research on single rooms in psychiatric and prison contexts as a window onto a larger sociopolitical and spatial analysis of current urban experiences of lockdown. In shifting the scale of analysis from the single room to the globe, Alexandre White examines how the course of Covid-19 has refuted the modern west's own colonialist myth of technical and scientific superiority in the face of pandemics.

Care for the Polis is a conversation that exists in a multitemporal and virtual space, a space designed to reimagine how medical humanities and public humanities shape, and are shaped by, the city and its diverse publics. In a series of weekly Z-Panels, our invited speakers will discuss the effects of health on the conception of cities and publics—including, in the context of pandemic, the foreclosure of public space and what it means to become an online yet domestic-bound public. Together, we will address emerging concerns such as economic impact and recovery, domesticity and democracy, public care and public reconstruction.

Keywords: seclusion, self-isolation, single rooms, epidemics, disease, polis