NECROPOLITICS VERSUS BIOPOLITICS: Spatialization, White Privilege, and Visibility during a Pandemic

Naturalizing unnatural death in Los Angeles County jails

In this paper we use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine how death investigations in Los Angeles County jails disproportionately naturalize death among Black and Latino incarcerated people. Our study is based on an assessment of 58 autopsies, coroner investigator narratives, and toxicology reports produced between 2009 and 2018. We found that the Medical Examiner frequently arrived at natural or undetermined death determinations that minimized the culpability of carceral staff for loss of life that occurred within county jail. In our dataset, Black people were disproportionately classified as natural. Undetermined deaths were almost exclusively Latino. More than 75% of the cases in our study were deaths that occurred before standing trial. Our findings reveal how biomedical knowledge about incarcerated Black and Latino people is used to erase the life-diminishing effects of punishment, neglect, and maltreatment that are central to the project of mass incarceration.

Failing kidneys: Hotspots, blind spots and biopolitics of indifference

Chronic kidney disease of non-traditional cause (CKDnt) is commonly associated with monocropping agriculture, heat stress and impoverished working conditions, referred to as CKDnt "hotspots." The condition is also emerging in various sites of environmental contamination, raising questions as to whether multiple variants of the condition exist as a result of different ecologies and different human-environment interactions. This paper examines the emergence of CKDnt around Lake Chapala in Mexico, where we document local efforts to gain recognition and reparation for CKDnt. We follow the ways patients, families and activists have mobilized specific and interlocking infrastructural failures to enact complaint and confront state inaction and neglect of their bodies, communities, and environments. Though their labors have formally achieved little, we discuss how they make visible a biopolitics of indifference, one bound to the production of structural "blindspots."

How and why to use 'vulnerability': an interdisciplinary analysis of disease risk, indeterminacy and normality

In recent years, 'vulnerability' has been getting more traction in theoretical, professional and popular spaces as an alternative or complement to the concept of risk. As a group of science and technology studies scholars with different disciplinary orientations yet a shared concern with biomedicine, self and society, we investigate how vulnerability has become a salient and even dominant idiom for discussing disease and disease risk. We argue that this is at least partly due to an inherent indeterminacy in what 'vulnerability' means and does, both within and across different discourses. Through a review of feminist and disability theory, and a discussion of how vulnerability and disease both get recruited into a binary conceptualisation of normal versus abnormal, we argue that vulnerability's indeterminacy is, in fact, its strength, and that it should be used differently than risk. Using COVID-19 management in the UK as an illustration of the current ambivalence and ambiguity in how vulnerability versus risk is applied, we suggest that instead of being codified or quantified, as it has started to be in some biomedical and public health applications, vulnerability and its remedies should be determined in conjunction with affected communities and in ways that are polyvalent, flexible and nuanced. The concept of vulnerability encapsulates an important precept: we must recognise inequality as undesirable while not attempting to 'solve' it in deterministic ways. Rather than becoming fixed into labels, unidirectional causalities or top-down universalising metrics, vulnerability could be used to insist on relational, context-specific understandings of disease and disease risk-in line with contemporary social justice movements that require non-hierarchical and non-universal approaches to problems and solutions.

COVID-19 spatialization by empirical Bayesian model in São Paulo, Brazil

The new Acute Respiratory Syndrome, COVID-19, has affected the health and the economy worldwide. Therefore, scientists have been looking for ways to understand this disease. In this context, the main objective of this study was the spatialization of COVID-19, thinking in distinguishing areas with high transmissibility yet, verifying if these areas were associated with the elderly population occurrence. The work was delineated, supposing that spatialization could support the decision-making to combat the outbreak and that the same method could be used for spatialization and prevent other diseases. The study area was a municipality near Sao Paulo Metropolis, one of Brazil's main disease epicenters. Using official data and an empirical Bayesian model, we spatialized people infected by region, including older people, obtaining reasonable adjustment. The results showed a weak correlation between regions infected and older adults. Thus, we define a robust model that can support the definition of actions aiming to control the COVID-19 spread.

The Carceral State: An American Story

This article reviews key works in the anthropology of mass incarceration, generated by anthropologists and their interlocutors whose research is directed outside physical sites of imprisonment. My geographical focus is on the United States during the last decade's political and economic Zeitgeist, shaped by the manifestations and consequences of the carceral state and the prison industrial complex. My discussion is also guided by research invigorated by anthropology's decolonizing drive and growing concern about racism within and outside the academy. Along the way, and emphasized in the final section, I make the case that anthropology's abiding interest in kinship is a productive approach for configuring our understanding of the American carceral state and the racial landscapes of carcerality. The research reviewed shows how deeply carcerality is embedded in race, illuminating its destructiveness in Black and brown communities, yet also revealing the creation of regenerative spaces of kinship.