2020 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Care for the Polis: Emergency By Design (5.7.20)

Mooney, Graham; Goyal, Rishi

Historian of Medicine Graham Mooney presents insights from critical mobilities studies to examine how historically, physicians, ambulance service managers, and urban health planners sought to overcome obstacles, posed by complex urban infrastructures, to the efficient transport and mobile treatment of the patient-passenger. In the greater discussion of how the ambulance links the domestic space to the institutional space, Rishi Goyal offers an insider's view of emergency medicine during the Covid-19 spike of March and April 2020 in New York City.

Care for the Polis is a conversation that exists in a multi-temporal 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: cities, ambulances, emergency rooms, ER, urban inequality, medical care, medicine, transportation, hospitals