Discover Society https://archive.discoversociety.org Measured - Factual - Critical Fri, 12 Feb 2021 08:44:53 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.14 Rapid Response: Decolonizing Italian Cities https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/02/06/rapid-response-decolonizing-italian-cities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rapid-response-decolonizing-italian-cities Sat, 06 Feb 2021 17:18:49 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7533 Annalisa Frisina and Elisabetta Campagni

Anti-racism is a battle for memory. Enzo Traverso well underlined how statues brought down in the last year show “the contrast between the status of blacks and postcolonial subjects as stigmatised and brutalised minorities and the symbolic place given in the public space to their oppressors”.

Material traces of colonialism are in almost every city in Italy, but finally streets, squares, monuments are giving us the chance to start a public debate on a silenced colonial history.

Igiaba Scego, Italian writer and journalist of Somali origins, is well aware of the racist and sexist violence of Italian colonialism and she points out the lack of knowledge on colonial history.

“No one tells Italian girls and boys about the squad massacres in Addis Ababa, the concentration camps in Somalia, the gases used by Mussolini against defenseless populations. There is no mention of Italian apartheid (…), segregation was applied in the cities under Italian control. In Asmara the inhabitants of the village of Beit Mekae, who occupied the highest hill of the city, were chased away to create the fenced field, or the first nucleus of the colonial city, an area off-limits to Eritreans. An area only for whites. How many know about Italian apartheid?” (Scego 2014, p. 105).

In her book, Roma negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (2014), she invites us to visually represent the historical connections between Europe and Africa, in creative ways; for instance, she worked with photographer Rino Bianchi to portray Afro-descendants in places marked by fascism such as Cinema Impero, Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana and Dogali’s stele in Rome.

Inspired by her book, we decided to go further, giving life to ‘Decolonizing the city. Visual Dialogues in Padova. Our goal was to question ourselves statues and street names in order to challenge the worldviews and social hierarchies that have made it possible to celebrate/forget the racist and sexist violence of colonialism. The colonial streets of Padova have been re-appropriated by the bodies, voices and gazes of six Italian Afro-descendants who took part in a participatory video, taking urban traces of colonialism out of insignificance and re-signifying them in a creative way.

Wissal Houbabi, artist “daughter of the diaspora and the sea in between“, moves with the soundtrack by Amir Issa Non respiro (2020), leaving her poetry scattered between Via Cirenaica and Via Libia.

“The past is here, insidious in our minds, and the future may have passed.

The past is here, even if you forget it, even if you ignore it, even if you do everything to deny the squalor of what it was, the State that preserves the status of frontiers and jus sanguinis.

If my people wanted to be free one day, even destiny would have to bend”.

Cadigia Hassan shares the photos of her Italian-Somali family with a friend of hers and then goes to via Somalia, where she meets a resident living there who has never understood the reason behind the name of that street. That’s why Cadigia has returned to via Somalia: she wants to leave traces of herself, of her family history, of historical intertwining and to make visible the important connections that exist between the two countries.

Ilaria Zorzan questions the colonial past through her Italo-Eritrean family photographic archive. The Italians in Eritrea made space, building roads, cableways, railways, buildings… And her grandfather worked as a driver and transporter, while her Eritrean grandmother, before marrying her grandfather, had been his maid. Ilaria conceals her face behind old photographs to reveal herself in Via Asmara through a mirror.

Emmanuel M’bayo Mertens is an activist of the Arising Africans association. In the video we see him conducting a tour in the historic center of Padova, in Piazza Antenore, formerly Piazza 9 Maggio. Emmanuel cites the resolution by which the municipality of Padova dedicated the square to the day of the “proclamation of the empire” by Mussolini (1936). According to Emmanuel, fascism has never completely disappeared, as the Italian citizenship law mainly based on jus sanguinis shows in the racist idea of ​​Italianness transmitted ‘by blood’. Instead, Italy is built upon migration processes, as the story of Antenor, Padova’s legendary founder and refugee, clearly shows.

Mackda Ghebremariam Tesfau’ questions the colonial map in Piazza delle Erbe where Libya, Albania, Ethiopia and Eritrea are marked as part of a white empire. She says that if people ignore this map it is because Italy’s colonial history is ignored. Moreover, today these same countries, marked in white on the map, are part of the Sub-saharan and Mediterranean migrant routes. Referring then to the bilateral agreements between Italy and Libya to prevent “irregular migrants” from reaching Europe, she argues that neocolonialism is alive. Quoting Aimé Césaire, she declares that “Europe is indefensible”.

The video ends with Viviana Zorzato, a painter of Eritrean origin. Her house, full of paintings inspired by Ethiopian iconography, overlooks Via Amba Aradam. Viviana tells us about the ‘Portrait of a N-word Woman’, which she has repainted numerous times over the years. Doing so meant taking care of herself, an Afro-descendant Italian woman. Reflecting on the colonial streets she crosses daily, she argues that it is important to know the history but also to remember the beauty. Amba Alagi or Amba Aradam cannot be reduced to colonial violence, they are also names of mountains, and Viviana possesses a free gaze that sees beauty. Like Giorgio Marincola, Viviana will continue to “feel her homeland as a culture” and she will have no flags to bow her head to.

The way in which Italy lost the colonies – that is with the fall of fascism instead of going through a formal decolonization process – prevented Italy from being aware of the role it played during colonialism. Alessandra Ferrini, in her ‘Negotiating amnesia‘,refers to an ideological collective amnesia: the sentiment of an unjust defeat fostered a sense of self-victimisation for Italians, removing the responsibility from them as they portrayed themselves as “brava gente” (good people). This fact, as scholars such as Nicola Labanca have explained, has erased the colonial period from the collective memory and public sphere, leaving colonial and racist culture in school textbooks, as the historian Gianluca Gabrielli (2015) has shown.

This difficulty in coming to terms with the colonial past was clearly visible in the way several white journalists and politicians reacted to antiracist and feminist movements’ request to remove the statue of journalist Indro Montanelli in Milan throughout the BLM wave. During the African campaign, Montanelli bought the young 12-year-old-girl “Destà” under colonial concubinage (the so‑called madamato), boasting about it even after being accused by feminist Elvira Banotti of being a rapist. The issue of Montanelli’s highlights Italy’s need to think critically over not only colonial but also race and gender violence which are embedded in it.

Despite this repressed colonial past, in the last decade Italy has witnessed a renewed interest stemming from bottom-up local movements dealing with colonial legacy in the urban space. Two examples are worth mentioning: Resistenze in Cirenaica (Resistances in Cyrenaica) in Bologna and the project “W Menilicchi!” (Long live Menilicchi) in Palermo. These instances, along with other contributions were collected in the Roots§Routes 2020 spring issue, “Even statues die”.

Resistenze in Cirenaica has been working in the Cyrenaica neighbourhood, named so in the past due to the high presence of colonial roads. In the aftermath of the second world war the city council decided unanimously to rename the roads carrying fascist and colonial street signs (except for via Libya, left as a memorial marker) with partisans’ names, honouring the city at the centre of the resistance movement during the fascist and Nazi occupation. Since 2015, the collective has made this place the centre of an ongoing laboratory including urban walks, readings and storytelling aiming to “deprovincialize resistances”, considering the battles in the ex-colonies as well as in Europe, against the nazi-fascist forces, as antiracist struggles. The publishing of Quaderni di Cirene (Cyrene’s notebooks) brought together local and overseas stories of people who resisted fascist and colonial occupation, with the fourth book addressing the lives of fighter and partisan women through a gender lens.

In October 2018, thanks to the confluence of Wu Ming 2, writer and storyteller from Resistenze in Cirenaica, and the Sicilian Fare Ala collective, a public urban walk across several parts of the city was organized, with the name “Viva Menilicchi!”. The itinerary (19 kms long) reached several spots carrying names of Italian colonial figures and battles, explaining them through short readings and theatrical sketches, adding road signs including stories of those who have been marginalized and exploited. Significantly, W Menilicchi! refers to Palermitan socialists and communists’ battle cry supporting king Menelik II who defeated the Italian troops in Aduwa in 1896, thus establishing a transnational bond among people subjected to Italian invasion (as Jane Schneider explores in Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, South Italy underwent a socio-economic occupation driven by imperial/colonial logics by the north-based Kingdom of Italy) . Furthermore, the urban walk drew attention to the linkage of racist violence perpetrated by Italians during colonialism with the killings of African migrants in the streets of Palermo, denouncing the white superiority on which Italy thrived since its birth (which run parallel with the invasion of Africa).

These experiences of “odonomastic guerrillas” (street-name activists) have found creative ways of decolonising Italian history inscribed in cities, being aware that a structural change requires not only time but also a wide bottom-up involvement of inhabitants willing to deal with the past. New alliances are developing as different groups network and coordinate in view of several upcoming dates, such as February 19th, which marks the anniversary of the massacre of Addis Ababa which occurred in 1937 at the hands of Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani.

References:
Gabrielli G. (2015), Il curriculo “razziale”: la costruzione dell’alterità di “razza” e coloniale nella scuola italiana (1860-1950), Macerata: Edizioni Università di Macerata.
Labanca, N. (2002) Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino.
Scego, I. (2014) Roma negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città, Roma: Ediesse.
Schneider J (ed.) (1998) Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, London: Routledge.

 

Annalisa Frisina is Associate professor of Sociology at the University of Padova, Italy. Her last book is “Razzismi Contemporanei. Le prospettive della sociologia” (“Contemporary Racisms. Sociological Perspectives”) published by Carocci, 2020. Elisabetta Campagni has a Masters in Sociology from the University of Padova, Italy. She works on issues of antiracism, second generations and minority rights through visual and artistic projects.

Image Credits:Decolonizzare la città. Dialoghi visuali a Padova” (still frames from our video).

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Rapid Response: The ‘trans-teens’ debate – why the High Court did the right thing https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/02/02/rapid-response-the-trans-teens-debate-why-the-high-court-did-the-right-thing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rapid-response-the-trans-teens-debate-why-the-high-court-did-the-right-thing https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/02/02/rapid-response-the-trans-teens-debate-why-the-high-court-did-the-right-thing/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2021 09:46:26 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7529 Tim Davies

On 18th January this year, the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust was granted leave to appeal the decision made by the High Court in December last year that if a clinician wishes to prescribe ‘puberty blockers’ – drugs that pause puberty – to someone under sixteen diagnosed with ‘gender dysphoria’- feelings of acute discomfort or distress over a perceived mismatch between their natal sex and gender identity – they must in future apply to the courts.

The issue of how best to help children and young people who suffer such distress has become highly charged, both emotionally and politically. The debate is presented as a battle between left and right, between those who support trans rights and the transphobic. I would argue that this is a misrepresentation.

It is clear that people who identify as transgender or non-binary face shocking levels of violence, harassment and discrimination. A report by Stonewall in 2018 based on research conducted by YouGov found 1 in 8 employees had been physically attacked by a colleague or customer in the last year and more than a quarter had experienced homelessness. Transphobia represents a real and present danger for trans people in this country as elsewhere.

However, to accuse of transphobia those who feel that there are legitimate questions to be raised around the specific issue of children and young people is unhelpful. The contention of this article is that the High Court judgement offers the best way forward for all young people struggling with gender identity issues at the present time.

The ‘gender affirmative’ and ‘gender critical’ positions
The use of puberty blockers is just one of the issues, albeit an important one, that divides the young people, parents, pressure groups and professionals involved in the debate. Although an oversimplification, one can usefully distinguish two sides in the debate: the ‘gender affirmative’ and the ‘gender critical’ position.

Essentially, those who support the gender affirmative position, such as Mermaids,  Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and GIRES, argue that the best approach is to ‘affirm’ the gender that children wish to identify with because this will lessen the level of distress the child will feel. Indeed, they claim that it reduces the risk of such children suffering from related mental health problems and, in the worst case scenario, contemplating suicide. Moreover, they claim that the effects of puberty blockers, should the adolescent change their mind about treatment, are ‘fully reversible’.

In addition, supporters of the gender affirmative position argue both that gender identity is not tied to one’s sex, but is free-floating and that a trans identity is innate – an essential part of who you are that can’t be changed (Stonewall). This is why any questioning of a person’s subjective gender identity – child or adult – is regarded as transphobic by supporters of this position.

Those who support the gender critical position, such as Transgender Trend, LGB Alliance, Fair Play for Women and Gender Health Query, argue that the problem for gender non-conforming children and young people is not that they’ve been ‘born into the wrong body’, but that they are confronted by a society in which restrictive and harmful gender stereotypes continue to operate. If children and young people were able to wear what they want and do what they want irrespective of their sex, the problem of gender dysphoria would largely disappear. For these groups, recourse to a medical solution for adolescents who experience distress around their gender identity represents the over-medicalization of gender nonconforming youth.

In addition, gender critical groups reject the idea that gender has no connection to sex and is free-floating. They also argue that there are many possible reasons why puberty can be a difficult time and that diagnoses of gender dysphoria may have missed underlying problems associated with sexual abuse, autistic spectrum disorders, homophobia or mental health.

(It is worth pointing out that all these gender critical organisations explicitly state their support for the right of adults to transition and for trans-equality.)

The High Court hearing
While some of the points of disagreement between these two positions were addressed by the court, many were not. This was because the primary issue under consideration was whether young people under eighteen were Gillick competent to make decisions about the administration of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria.

The case was initiated by Susan Evans, a former clinician at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the only specialist clinic in England and Wales for children experiencing gender dysphoria, run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust. Evans had resigned because she felt GIDS was too readily referring children on for puberty blockers and had crowd-funded an application for judicial review of the policy.

In a lengthy and tightly argued judgement, the judges expressed the view that the treatment of gender dysphoria with puberty blockers represented an ‘experimental’ treatment because too little was known for sure about their long term effects. Up to June, 2020 the NHS website had informed readers that the effects of GnRH analogues (puberty blockers) are considered to be fully reversible. Since June, 2020 however readers are informed that little is known about the long-term effects of …puberty blockers in children with gender dysphoria. (I)t is not known what the psychological effects may be (nor how they may) affect the development of the teenage brain or children’s bones.

The judges dismissed the claim that the information provided by GIDS was misleading and insufficient, arguing that the quality of information provided was not really the issue. Never mind how detailed and age-appropriate it was, the problem in their view was that children simply were not capable of fully comprehending the long term implications of taking medication which would impact on their future fertility and sexual functioning. They also argued that, in practice, research indicated that taking puberty blockers more or less inevitably led on to taking cross-sex hormones. GIDS had carried out a study of this very issue, but did not have the results available for the court. However, the day after the court’s judgement was released they finally published the results which vindicated the judges’ opinion: 43 out of 44 children aged between 12 and 15 who had been enrolled on the GIDS programme in 2011 and who had been prescribed puberty blockers subsequently chose to start treatment with cross-sex hormones.

The High Court concluded that: It is highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give assent to the administration of puberty blockers (and) it is doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long term risks and consequences…

However, the court did not outlaw the prescribing of puberty blockers to children under sixteen. Instead, exercising the precautionary principle, it ruled that, in future, clinicians who wished to prescribe puberty blockers to such children must seek a ‘best interests’ ruling from the courts and, in addition, suggested they may wish to do this even for 16 and 17year olds.

Societal changes
In examining this debate, there are a number of recent social changes that need to be looked at which have, arguably, had a major impact on both the number and the demographic characteristics of children and young people presenting with gender dysphoria.

Firstly, there is the rapid increase in recent years in the numbers of youngsters experiencing gender identity problems, evidenced by the 400% increase in referrals to GIDS between 2015 and 2020. Secondly, there is the reversal in the gender ratio of referrals from roughly equal numbers of boys and girls to substantially more girls. In its first year of operation as part of the NHS (2009/10), 40 boys and 32 girls were referred, but in 2018/19, there were 624 boys and 1740 girls, nearly 3 times as many.

Clearly there is more going on here than simply increased coverage of trans issues in the media in recent years and the consequent increase in awareness around issues relating to gender dysphoria. A range of factors have been suggested as relevant.

First, young people appear to  be more accepting of identities that do not conform to traditional gender binaries (male/female) and heterosexuality. Whilst gender identity and sexual orientation are distinct, raising questions about one tends to impact on the other. Evidence about young people’s changing attitudes towards gender identity in the UK tends to be impressionistic (a situation that may shortly be remedied as it has recently been announced that the 2021 UK Census will include a question on gender identity). But there is survey evidence regarding changing attitudes towards both gender and sexuality in the USA and sexuality in the UK.

A survey by the Harris polling organisation of a nationally representative sample of over 2000 adults in the USA reported in Time magazine in 2017, found 20% of ‘millenials’ said they were something other than straight (heterosexual) and cis-gender ( a gender identity that matches natal sex) compared to only 7% of ‘baby boomers’. Moreover, more than three-quarters of the respondents said it feels like “more people than ever” have “non-traditional” sexual orientations and gender identities. Similarly, an on-line survey carried out in 2017 by the anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label of 1006 young people in both the USA and UK found that whilst 43% identified as exclusively heterosexual and 10% exclusively homosexual, 47% placed themselves somewhere on a continuum between these two poles.

Secondly, in relation to the rapid rise in the number of young females being referred to GIDS, a number of factors have been suggested. One is the impact of celebrity culture and social media on young women’s ideas about how they should look and their increasing willingness to use both surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures to ‘enhance’ their appearance. Another is the growing level of body image concerns, in young women particularly. A  poll carried out by Plan International UK in 2019 of over 1,000 14-21 year olds found that a large majority (89%) felt pressure to fit an ‘ideal’ face or body type, a quarter (25%) felt ‘ashamed or disgusted’ by their body and over a third (39%) worried about their appearance in school ‘every day’. A third is the explosion of on-line sites supporting the idea of transitioning – similar to the growth of ‘pro-ana’ (anorexia) sites for young women some years ago. Finally, there is the increasing amount of time young women spend on-line.  The millennium cohort study in the UK which is following a large group born in 2000 found that whilst two fifths of girls spend more than 3 hours a day on social media, the figure for boys is one fifth.

The gender critical position argues that these societal changes have produced an upsurge in the number of young people, particularly girls, who are susceptible to the idea that transitioning would solve their problems. This, indeed, was the conclusion of a paper written in 2018 by an American academic, Lisa Littman, who coined the term ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’ to refer to a new phenomenon she had observed where multiple, or even all, members of a group of friends became transgender-identified around the same time through immersion in social media. Supporters of the gender critical position also argue that girls who would previously have gone on to identify as lesbians are now being persuaded that they are ‘really’ trans.

Analysis
These societal changes strongly suggest that among those children and young people recently and currently presenting with gender dysphoria are likely to be at least some who would later go on to regret taking puberty blockers. In essence, the court had to make a choice between two scenarios. In one, children who are desperate to begin the process of transitioning and would subsequently experience no regret are forced to wait longer to do so. In the other, children who claim to be desperate to transition but subsequently would regret starting down this road are saved from themselves. The judges chose the latter option, in my opinion the right one given the literally life-changing consequences of taking puberty blockers.

Gender affirmative activists have complained that this will impose a further delay for those in the first scenario, given that there is already an inordinately lengthy waiting time for children referred to GIDS to actually get an appointment. In 2020, there were over 4600 young people on the waiting list and young people were waiting over two years for their first appointment.

This was not GIDS fault, however, but the fault of NHS England who commissions their services and had not been prepared to fund the service adequately. In September, 2020 the NHS announced that it had commissioned an independent review into gender identity services for young people to be led by Dr Hilary Cass. The report is due sometime this year. Hopefully, it will address the issue of inadequate funding.

Why are trans activists so unwilling to accept that the rapid growth in numbers of children referred to GIDS in recent years is likely to include children whose commitment to transitioning is equivocal, many of whom if left untreated are likely to eventually identify as lesbian or gay?

I believe there are a number of reasons, but the main one perhaps is that, given the existence of transphobia in society, trans activists are likely to feel under endless pressure. When you feel your back’s to the wall, you are reluctant to concede any ground to your opponents for fear that it would be seen as a sign of weakness and lead to a worsening of your already fraught situation.

Understandable as such a stance would be, however, it seems to me that the trans rights movement could only benefit from an acknowledgement of the possibility of misdiagnosis. It would demonstrate to the public at large that this was a movement that was both socially responsible and merited respect.

 

Tim Davies is an Associate Lecturer in social science with the Open University.

 

 

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‘COLONIAL VIRUS’?  COVID19, Black immunity myth and Africa   https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/02/01/colonial-virus-covid19-black-immunity-myth-and-africa/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=colonial-virus-covid19-black-immunity-myth-and-africa https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/02/01/colonial-virus-covid19-black-immunity-myth-and-africa/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2021 09:17:49 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7525 Leona Vaughn, Allen Kiconco, Nii Kwartelai Quartey, Collins Seymah Smith and Isabel Zattu Ziz

COVID-19 was categorised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. The direct and indirect racialisation of COVID-19 was established early on.  The virus, widely claimed to originate through what was communicated via a Western lens as ‘abnormal’ cultural eating habits, was from the outset racialised as a ‘Chinese problem’. Various racialised terms were applied, such as the ‘Wuhan virus’ and the ‘Kung Fu Flu’, the latter term even used by the then President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.

The global Sinophobia (anti-Chinese sentiment) which ensued, especially as cases of the virus began to appear across Australia, Europe and USA, manifested in ways ranging from social media memes and jokes, through to increased racist attacks on people perceived to be of Chinese descent. Simultaneously, another form of racialised narrative began to emerge at the early stages of the pandemic regarding the risk of infection, particularly within Chinese and Western media. However, this time in ways maintained to be ‘positive’. This was the narrative about how African and African descended people were supposedly immune to COVID-19.

“There are so many stupid, ridiculous conspiracy theories about black people not being able to get it. …That is the quickest way to get more black people killed.” Idris Elba

Between May and July 2020, a University of Liverpool research project brought together academics and community-based researchers in the UK, South Africa, Kenya and Ghana, to co-design rapid research to explore the racialisation of risk narratives for preventing COVID-19 infection in South Africa, Kenya and Ghana. Researchers examined social media, media, government policy and local radio to identify and collate local examples of risk narratives about prevention of COVID-19 infection to explore how or if the understandings of risk were racialised.

The research sought to identify how racialised assumptions about COVID-19 risk and prevention, particularly the immunity myth for African people and those of African descent impacted on the public and State risk narratives for preventing infection in countries on the African continent. The publication of separate country reports on what researchers found in Ghana, South Africa and Kenya is a way of reflecting the specificity of what was happening in relation to COVID-19 prevention narratives in media and State policy/strategy. A comparative analysis of a number of common racialisation themes is provided in the fourth report.

“…there is absolutely no evidence to back up the idea – and indeed, we know that people with black skin are getting infected.”  Professor Thumbi Ndung’u, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine (Durban)

The myth of melanated skin having some form of resistance to COVID-19, started in China and gained momentum in Europe and the Americas, but it definitely affected these African countries during in the early days of the pandemic. However, our research showed how more than this singular myth, the idea of biological race in these African societies was an intrinsic part of their pandemic discourses and responses.

Immunity and the Racialised ‘Infodemic’
According to Mirriam-Webster, ‘Infodemic’ is ‘a blend of ‘information’ and ‘epidemic’ that typically refers to a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information about something, such as a disease. As facts, rumors [sic], and fears mix and disperse, it becomes difficult to learn essential information about an issue.’ This became increasingly used in relation to international responses to COVID-19 misinformation and myths. In mid- February 2020, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO,  at a gathering of foreign policy and security experts in Munich, Germany, warned that ‘We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,’ referring to fake news that ‘spreads faster and more easily than this virus.’

What we observed in this research was that for these three African countries, the nature of the infodemic about COVID-19 was and is often racialised. This was detected primarily through social media posts and memes or jokes, but also in messages from political and religious leaders, and occurred primarily in two key ways.  Firstly, there was explicit racialisation in terms of who was believed to be more or less at risk of infection (immunity/susceptibility) and in terms of who was perceived as presenting the most risk to others, i.e. who were the main ‘spreaders’ of infection. Secondly, there was implicitly racialised misinformation, again about immunity and susceptibility, but also about prevention, treatment and cures.

In efforts to counter the plethora of false information about how to prevent the risk of infection, the WHO developed a public resource for ‘mythbusting’. This included addressing the misconceptions which could be argued to only affect people in the Global South, or those descended from these areas. These were mainly the myths that hot climates or sunshine meant that the risk of being infected with Coronavirus was reduced and that adding hot pepper to food would not prevent infection.

However, the WHO ‘myth-busting’ strategy fails to specifically articulate the need for this campaign to counteract the myths, of unknown origins, which were clearly racially imagined. Actively addressing misinformation, but not considering the racialised nature of this, only reinforced the ‘deficit’ framing of local indigenous knowledge as ‘backward’ natural, spiritual, religious or mythical beliefs. This combined with an absence of transparency and data-sharing on the risk of Coronavirus, that is locally produced and trusted, leaves a void that can be filled with powerful and persuasive social (sometimes religious), media (even celebrity) and political narratives. Power is the main dynamic in what information prevails. It is not known who was involved in creating the content for this campaign, but when it comes to harmfully racialised misinformation and myths those who are most affected by its impact should be empowered to counteract them with their knowledge and expertise.

Finding the source of memes, What’s App videos or jokes was impossible. Many of these were overtly racialised in nature but understanding who has created them, from where and for what purpose can shed light on these powerful influencers of beliefs and opinions, especially in relation to COVID-19 origination and prevention of risks.

We observed the influence these forms of communications seemed to have on people and how they created or reinforced racialised ideas. There was a clear unquestioning aspect to some of these communications, especially if they were perceived as ‘positive stereotypes’ rather than explicitly offensive or racist, most likely because people don’t know where they have originated from. There will likely be an assumption that ‘positive’ myths have emanated from within the group they are seen to bestow advantage upon (i.e. Black immunity myths come from Black people).  However, it is worth clearly restating that in our attempts to study the racialisation of misinformation, we were hamstrung by the inability to see where information was emanating from.

The Desire to Believe in Black Advantage
The mythologies about treatment and prevention, of which Black immunity is one, was starting to gain attention in regional action to undermine ‘misinformation’ or ‘fake news’. It was clear that this misinformation posed a risk to the effective COVID-19 responses by institutions, governments and people in African countries. Nonetheless, it was in the main positively received in risk narratives. Using an Afrocentric lens, it is understandable that there is a desire to have something to shift the balance of rhetoric about Africa, Africans and people of African descent. The Afrocentric concept Asante recommends is explained by Ama Mazama as a paradigm to address the problem of ‘[African descended people’s] unconscious adoption of the Western worldview and perspective and their attendant conceptual frameworks…[relegating African people to] spectators of a show that defines us from without.’

Not wanting to be seen as a victim and inferior is attractive to any individual or group who regularly experience discrimination and oppression. The popularity of these narratives of innate African [Black] strength and resilience to the virus is in a sense a response to the relentless pressure of global racism, likely heightened by the increased visibility, especially on social media, of racist brutality and the call of Black Lives Matter. For individuals and the State, it offered an alternative discourse which could disrupt the non-stop stream of negative portrayals of Black people, particularly Black Africans.

In terms of the latter, Africa being ‘under-developed’ or ‘developing’ nations that have not yet caught up to the ‘advanced’ nations of the Global North underpins not only media narratives, but even the narratives of international development. It is understandable for African and African descended people’s narratives to cling onto, especially at this time, any form of perceived advantage over so-called developed nations and an advantage to being Black in such an unequal world. This mythology drew upon spiritual belief (in respect of the African relationship to nature), religious belief and even references from popular culture such as the Marvel comic and film Black Panther. The miraculous resistance that increased melanin was proposed to offer in these narratives, however, is problematically predicated on the ‘magical negro’ belief and steeped in Western eugenicist notions.

This research demonstrates how at the outset of the pandemic, the ideas of Black immunity, which to some extent is creeping back through questions about why African countries have had lower deaths, melded together with the ideas that this virus should not or would not affect Africans. There is tragic irony to the racialised immunity myth and the potential impact of this on the lived reality of Black people during the pandemic. It has not yet been empirically traced or captured, if it is even at all possible, but its influence is theoretically multi-fold.

 

Dr Leona Vaughn (@DrLeeVee) is a Derby Fellow for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Theme of ‘Slavery & Unfree Labour’ at University of Liverpool, UK. Dr Allen Kiconco (@Kiconcoa) is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.Nii Kwartelai Quartey (@NKwartelai) is a Project Officer at James Town Community Theatre, Ghana. Collins Seymah Smith (@seymahsmith) is Executive Director of Act for Change Ghana. Isabel Zattu Ziz (@i_zattu) is Senior Media Technician at Kibabii University, Kenya.

For more information on this project, see the website (@c19race).

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Children in Crisis: Child Poverty and COVID-19 https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/01/26/children-in-crisis-child-poverty-and-covid-19/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=children-in-crisis-child-poverty-and-covid-19 Tue, 26 Jan 2021 08:54:16 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7523 Basma Yaghi

Newspaper headlines have had a consistent theme in the past month. UNICEF feeding British children for the first time, the free school meals fiasco that was called a “disgrace” by the Prime Minister, and the Government planning to end the boost to Universal Credit. These all have a connection to one common problem: child poverty. COVID-19 has brought this issue to the fore and exacerbated conditions for the 30% of children in the UK experiencing poverty. Government policies to provide social security for children in poverty are limited in expenditure with insufficient breadth. Education policies are only being rolled out slowly and inefficiently after intense political pressure. This points to policy changes needed to support some of the country’s most vulnerable children during the COVID-19 crisis.

Social Security Policies
Attention has recently directed on social security policies such as Universal Credit, with a temporary £20 increase in the basic rate of this benefit being a key policy change in response to increasing poverty rates. This is particularly important for families with children, who comprise 40% of those on Universal Credit. This makes it short-sighted for the government to end this top-up to Universal Credit in April 2021. The enormous 108% increase in couples with children receiving Universal Credit from the start of the pandemic to August 2020 indicates that poverty among families with children is intensifying rather than decreasing. Maintaining this £20 rise throughout the Parliament and (increasing it in line with inflation) can help prevent a further 730,000 children from falling into poverty.

To make Universal Credit more flexible and beneficial for children, the government should reform its policies which propel child poverty for large families, such as the two-child limit. This limit means that a family can receive Universal Credit or Working Tax Credit for only their first two children if their other children are born after April 2017. It amounts to a reduction in support of £2,782 yearly for every child who does not qualify for support, compared to what they would have been entitled to before this policy’s implementation. This makes it unsurprising that families with three or more children have higher rates of poverty.

Alongside the two-child limit, social security policies include a benefit cap of £23,000 a year in London and £20,000 annually elsewhere. This cap leaves benefits inadequate for many families who face substantial shortfalls between the safety net they can access and the costs they must meet, which is particularly pertinent in the current COVID-19 context. Indeed, the contradiction in policy of increasing benefits while simultaneously having a benefit cap means that benefit uplifts exclude many families most in need of support. Given how such families’ income and hence children’s poverty and living standards have been exacerbated by COVID-19, there is a strong case for the government to abolish the two-child limit and benefit cap.

A positive initiative for children has been the £170 million COVID-19 Winter Grant scheme. This asks local authorities to ring-fence 80% of the funding to support low-income families with children in paying for food and bills. However, local authorities do not have access to Universal Credit data, suggesting they lack comprehensive knowledge of all the families in receipt of benefits or in difficult circumstances in their local area. The government can facilitate councils in administering this policy by opening data access to them, assisting them in targeting families with children most in need.

Amidst all these policies, tackling child poverty also necessitates a consideration of the intersectional nature of poverty, and incorporating neglected groups such as migrant children into policies. The government has dismissed the needs of those children whose families have no recourse to public funds. These are migrants who are not citizens of European Economic Area countries, and hence are not allowed to access most state-funded benefits. Their exclusion from state support means migrant children, who usually have ethnic minority status, are at greater risk of destitution.

Education Policies
The educational support for children in poverty in the form of resources has been hampered by U-turns and delays. Free school meals have been at the heart of this, and this provision for children whose parents receive benefits has been plagued with uncertainty. This is because the government reversed its free school meal policy by first refusing then agreeing to provide them over the summer holidays. Most recently, the government had issued guidance recommending that schools prioritise giving food parcels. After severe backlash associated with the meagre food packages, the government retracted this guidance and has now granted schools the freedom to choose between food parcels, local vouchers or national vouchers. Nevertheless, the option preferred by parents of children in poverty would be direct cash payments. These would less stigmatising and enable parents to make choices about where to shop for their children rather than be confined to the supermarkets where vouchers can be used.

Another element worthy of noting is the inclusion of some groups of children whose families have no recourse to public funds as eligible for free school meals. This is a welcome move. However, it is only a temporary shift in policy due to COVID-19, reflective of the myopic changes the government has been making. In recognition of the fact that poor migrant children’s need to be nourished extends beyond COVID-19, the government should make this a permanent expansion to their free school meals eligibility criteria.

Access to digital devices is also crucial for children to continue their education remotely, given higher government expectations of the amount of home learning to be undertaken. While the government had distributed laptops over the summer 2020 term, these were only allocated to a narrow range of children such as care leavers. The government’s later efforts to increase allocation of laptops to disadvantaged children proved insufficient, as two-thirds of state schools had to provide IT equipment for disadvantaged children whilst waiting for government support. During the third national lockdown, the government committed to providing 300,000 more laptops and tablets to be dispatched to disadvantaged childrenHowever, they are slow in achieving their target, with over 60,000 devices left to be delivered (as of the 17th of January). Implementing this policy at a faster pace is critical to prevent children living in poverty from falling further behind in their studies and increasing the attainment gap associated with their socioeconomic disadvantage.

The recently announced inquiry from the Work and Pensions Committee about addressing the growing number of children facing poverty is essential. However, the Department of Work and Pensions and Department for Education have no time to waste in adopting a multifaceted and holistic cross-governmental approach to ending child poverty. If the government does not urgently take further action, it could marginalise over 4.2 million children and drive them into deeper poverty amid a global pandemic.

 

Basma Yaghi is a social policy researcher and recent MSc in International Social and Public Policy Research graduate of the London School of Economics. Her main interest is education policy, especially in relation to disadvantaged groups.

Image Credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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The farmers’ protests in India and academic freedom: connecting the dots between farming and education https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/01/14/the-farmers-protests-in-india-and-academic-freedom-connecting-the-dots-between-farming-and-education/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-farmers-protests-in-india-and-academic-freedom-connecting-the-dots-between-farming-and-education https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/01/14/the-farmers-protests-in-india-and-academic-freedom-connecting-the-dots-between-farming-and-education/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2021 13:11:24 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7517 International Solidarity for Academic Freedom in India (InSAF India)

Since the farmers’ protests started and intensified, in particular in the state of Punjab, soon after the Indian government announced its new farm bills in the summer of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, many publications and commentators have tried to explain the complexities and implications of these bills. This article focuses on a lesser examined angle of the debate: the connection between the farmer protests and the arrests of scholars and civic activists.

The Indian government alleges that farmers are being misled by political forces opposing the state, that they are being diverted towards other causes supposedly unrelated to the farm laws. Given the widespread misinformation and myth-making that is characteristic of public policy and mainstream media strategy in India, it is important to debunk hollow accusations, keeping in mind the broader picture.

In a bid to discredit the farmers’ arguments, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and government representatives have alleged that the farmers are being misinformed and misled towards other political agendas, ranging from Khalistan to Maoism. Leaving aside the arrogance of such a claim, it reflects on those who refuse to acknowledge that farmers can think for themselves, have been protesting for several years already and are currently organising themselves in unprecedented ways. However, hardly any media have paid attention to the plights of agrarian societies in the past decades. In contrast, farmer unions have taken extensive efforts to educate the people and are pro-actively utilising independent communication channels (e.g. Kisan Ekta Morcha IT cell and Trolley Times).

Many independent YouTube channels are also helping educate people, see, for example, Bahujan TV’s interviews with Harinder and Sahib Singh at the protest sites. There are also numerous sophisticated analyses of the laws and their repercussions made by the farmers themselves in a vocabulary that has been shaped by their own efforts. Farmers across the country are aware of their regional differences and diversities, and are building networks of solidarity and support. Farmers are part of a broader horizontal, egalitarian movement for social and ecological justice, a point that is made by farmers across the globe, who are supporting this historic protest.

Let’s take a closer look at who is supposedly misleading the farmers and to what ends. Piyush Goyal, the minister of railways and commerce and industry, recently noted that “demands being raised on a farmers’ platform to release so-called intellectuals and poets clearly demonstrates an effort today to derail farmer, farm law improvements”. However, those who oppose land displacement and mega-development projects are easily discredited as ‘Maoist’ or as plotting to overthrow the state. Terms like ultra-leftists and urban Naxals are ill-defined and serve as excuses to imprison anyone who speaks up and points to injustices. It is not the case that “Maoists” are infiltrating the farmer movements. It is rather the case that the corporate state is infiltrating into people’s lands, plundering the mountains and forests and rivers.

In a demonstration of solidarity, International Human Rights Day, 10 December 2020, at the Tikri protest site, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Ekta Ugrahan) held an event demanding the release of arrested students, academics and civic activists. Even in their manifesto published months prior to this protest, the BKU (EU) argued how their demands are closely tied to the demands of scholar-activists and students. Several of these arrested scholars have been outspoken about the attack on civil liberties, about practices of land-grabbing for mining and other industries, and the illegal nature of several developmental projects, whereby Adivasi communities have been deprived of their rights and the environment has been destroyed. When farmers stand in solidarity with these imprisoned activists and demand their release, they stand with those who stood and those who are standing with them, and who continue to do so even in prison.

The argument used to discredit the farmer protests in fact diverts attention from the government’s own abuse of the rule of law through draconian, unconstitutional laws such as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Approximately 4,000 people have been arrested under the UAPA, often as undertrials on arbitrary grounds, without the possibility of bail and little legal recourse.

In addition, in its multi-language publicity booklet “Putting farmers first”,  the government oddly employs arguments supposedly drawn from science and agricultural expertise to both discredit the farmer protests as well as justify the farm bills. Yet, whereas countries around the world are now trying to undo the damage as a result of heavily industrialised agriculture, the Indian government turns a blind eye to the care for the environment and refers to the pseudo-science that suits its own agendas, giving preferential treatment to big businesses that control the entire supply chain rather than to small farmers and an ecologically sound and sustainable smallholder agricultural system.

The argument that the new laws will double farmers’ incomes and other benefits to them has also been contested by researchers following agricultural policy. This obviously does not imply that the existing situation is perfect (see the Swaminathan report). The enormous economic and ecological crisis of rural India is one that needs to be seriously addressed. However, it needs to be done with the help of science that is committed to social and ecological justice.

How does all this concern academics? The farm laws mark a clear step towards the deregulation of the agricultural sector and the retreat of the state, a neoliberal policy that is already being applied to education, public health and other sectors. Just like farmers have not been consulted in the reform bills that affect their lives and livelihoods, so the new educational policy has been issued with very little consultation and involvement of academics and educationists. Just like small-scale and subsistence farms are pushed to the brink and privileges are showered upon large agrobusinesses, so universally accessible public education aimed at building an independent citizenry is squeezed dry in favour of a technology-driven, ethically empty, elitist education system. There are numerous instances of corporate-oriented agricultural reforms around the world, which have impoverished the population and go hand in hand with the corporatization of education.

More significantly, pauperization of rural communities will amplify their exclusion from education. That is, education in anything more than the tokenistic sense is becoming more and more inaccessible, especially for rural populations.  When farmers are driven into debt and their incomes are at the mercy of multinational corporations, when subsistence and landless farmers are displaced to make way for special economic zones and large agribusinesses, it will result in the exclusion of vast sections of the Indian rural population from education. Students from poor, oppressed caste rural communities as well as from Adivasi backgrounds face systemic discrimination in the educational system and are disadvantaged in multiple ways.

Finally, hidden in the legal jargon of the laws is a clause that removes the right of farmers to any form of legal recourse [Sections 13 and 15 of The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020]. This is unconstitutional and sets a precedent for all others, placing the rights of corporations above those of ordinary citizens.  The rights of rural communities at large, extending beyond farming to all other allied livelihoods, have been treated with consistent disdain and neglect. To add to this, scholars who have spent years researching the problems of agrarian communities and who have highlighted injustices faced by these communities, are facing criminal charges such as terrorism, and are being imprisoned with little right to legal recourse.

 

InSAF India is a diverse group of diasporic Indian academics and professionals located in different parts of the world. We stand in support with the ongoing farmers’ protests in India and share their concerns about the corporatisation of the agricultural sector and their distrust of the Indian government’s promises of development and prosperity.

Image credit: Randeep Maddoke, “Indian farmers’ protest: Art, pen and people”, Wikipedia Commons

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Farmers’ protests in India as a counter hegemonic social force https://archive.discoversociety.org/2021/01/11/farmers-protests-in-india-as-a-counter-hegemonic-social-force/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=farmers-protests-in-india-as-a-counter-hegemonic-social-force Mon, 11 Jan 2021 14:25:21 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7512 Simin Fadaee  

Farmers and agricultural workers have been blocking numerous entry points at the borders of New Delhi for more than a month. They travelled from great distances to India’s capital by tractors, buses and on foot, to demand the repeal of three controversial laws passed in September. This has come after a series of large protests were organised in their respective states particularly in some of India’s main food growing states such as Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Over the past few weeks protesters had to cope with challenges and constraints resulting from the ongoing COVID 19 pandemic and they have been attacked by police numerous times. Moreover, a number of protestors have died from hypothermia. However, they have vowed to continue protesting until their demands are met. The government has urged the protestors to disband yet no agreement has been reached after several rounds of talks, so the protests continue.

India’s farming sector employs more than half of India’s workforce and has been in crisis for decades. This has taken its toll on rural communities. More than 300,000 farmers have taken their own lives since the 1990s. According to the latest reports 28 people dependent on farming commit suicide every day in India. The ongoing agrarian crisis has its roots in the neoliberal reforms that have shaped India’s political economy since the early 1990s and the Green Revolution before that. Due to these reforms, state intervention in agriculture declined and led to rising costs of produce, decreasing incomes and increased indebtedness for farmers. Moreover, the neoliberal policies resulted in the decline of available agricultural land and unequal distribution of land has left the majority of Indian farmers landless or with small and marginal holdings – today 85% of Indian farmers are small holders with less than two hectares of land. In many cases, those with small pieces of land need to supplement working on their own land with wage labour. These trends have led to an unprecedented crisis in the agricultural sector which have accelerated since the liberalisation of India’s economy in the 1990s.  At the same time, climate change has led to severe drought and crop failures, and intensified the crisis in several states such as Punjab and Maharashtra.

In 2014, Narendra Modi gained the support of peasants and agricultural workers by promising a minimum of 50 per cent profits over the cost of production for farmers, the implementation of farm insurance and a National Land Use Policy among other policy initiatives. Despite Modi’s promises, many feared the prospect of economic reform and repression against pro-farmer activists. Shortly after Modi’s victory, a call by All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) – the peasants’ front of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – convened a host of organizations including numerous political parties and civil society organisations. In 2015 these groups participated in the first large demonstration against Modi in response to the government’s aggressive changes to the Land Acquisition Act of 2013. The main organizations involved returned to their respective states and launched protests in Rajasthan, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

On 6 June 2017 police fired on a group of farmers in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and six were killed. Protests in Madhya Pradesh followed the strike in the Western state of Maharashtra, where farmers a few days earlier had launched a strike by dumping vegetables and milk on the road, demanding debt relief and higher prices for their produce. Shortly after the killings, around 150 farmers’ organizations came together and formed the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), an umbrella group which works with over 200 farmers’ organizations from all over India. In November 2018 this umbrella group brought together representatives from different states of India to march to the Parliament and demand a special session to discuss the deepening agrarian crisis. Two of their immediate demands were debt waivers and higher crop prices. At the same time, a large campaign called Dilli Chalo, which translates as ‘March to Delhi,’ was launched to encourage non-farm groups particularly middle classes to support the farmers’ march. As a result, an alliance of different activist groups, oppositional political parties, trade unions and students cohered to support the farmers and their demands. During the months after this, AIKSCC organized events and gatherings in different states and capitals and invited different farm groups as well as students, lawyers, artists and journalists to join.

Although these meetings had their own foci in each state, a sense of unity, collaboration and inter group connection had emerged among different groups from all regions and backgrounds. This strong sense of unity has been represented in numerous events and protests including the recent mobilisations against the new farm laws which were passed by India’s Parliament in September 2020. The new laws would be a move towards more deregulation for the agricultural sector. They are meant to enable the farmers to sell their produce anywhere including to the private buyers and big retailers such as Walmart, putting the 85% of farmers who own less than two hectares of land at the mercy of private companies and large corporations. Moreover, farmers believe the new laws would undermine their food sovereignty by removing the Minimum Support Price (MSP) which is the price the government buys some of their products such as rice and wheat at government regulated wholesale markets. The MSP has for a long time protected the poorest farmers from the vagaries of the market. Many farmers fear they will not have enough bargaining power to get a reasonable price if these regulations are scrapped and they have to sell their produce to large companies. This would deteriorate their living situation and would be a threat to their livelihood. Farmers whose produce is eligible for MSP would particularly be affected and this includes India’s northern farm states of Punjab and Haryana who are among the main protesting groups.

For the government this is a step forward to encourage large-scale private sector investment in agriculture and consolidate land. Narendra Modi has insisted that the reforms are in the farmers’ interest and have blamed opposition political parties for spreading rumours and lies. The government has insisted MSP will continue and they will still buy staples at guaranteed price. However, such assurances have failed to convince millions of farmers who have repeatedly raised their concern over increased involvement of corporations in agriculture. Farmers have repeatedly stated they will not compromise on their demands.

At the demonstration sites, farmers carry placards with slogans such as ‘we feed the world’ or ‘no farmer no food’. They demonstrate their tribute to India’s revolutionary inheritance by hanging Bhagat Singh’s picture in numerous locations and chanting the revolutionary slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ (Long live the revolution) which was popularised by Singh and his associates in the 1920s during their struggle against British imperialism. Farmers have set up kitchens where they cook and eat together and feed as many people as they can. While men have dominated the public image of the ongoing protests, women have fought shoulder to shoulder and have been the backbone of the protests, from running the communal kitchens, distributing food and giving speeches at rallies. Many of these women are widows or family members of male farmers who have committed suicide over the years, although as the situation worsens in rural India, the number of women who also take their own lives has increased. In spite of their significant contribution to the sector only 12% of women farmers have land titles, which means that women are hardly recognized as farmers. This marginalisation makes them even more vulnerable to exploitation by large corporations.

What is remarkable is a sense of community spirit that dominates the protest sites. Farmers are joined by individual volunteers and sympathetic groups who are helping them to continue their protest. Some have opened their homes to the protesters, others provide food, blankets and tents. The Dilli Chalo campaign which started in 2018 is clearly present and contributes to the growing support for farmers. Apart from various farmers’ organisations, farmers’ unions and farmers’ fronts, numerous communist parties, student groups and trade unions are present too and support the farmers in numerous ways.

Regardless of the outcome of the ongoing protests, what is apparent is that farmers’ mobilisations in India have turned to a site of resistance against the status quo. Within the past few years farmers have become one of India’s most organised groups and have not only brought together large coalition of farm organisations and groups such as large farmers, small farmers, agricultural workers, Adivasis (tribes), Dalits (ex-untouchables), different religions and women farmers, but their distress has led to an alliance with urban activists and civil society groups, workers, students, and oppositional political parties. What is clear is that India’s agrarian crisis and the structural causes of this crisis will not simply be resolved by certain reforms or changes in certain laws. Therefore, unless the neoliberal policies of the Indian state which benefits the rich minority is replaced by more humane and pro-people policies which safeguards the wellbeing and livelihood of the majority; it is expected that the counter-hegemonic force that has been unleashed by farmers’ discontent will continue to mobilise and demand justice.

 

Simin Fadaee is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. Simin’s research is broadly on issues of political sociology, social movements and activism, environmentalism and environmental politics and she has conducted research in a number of places but mostly in Iran, India and Germany.

Image Credit: Author’s own

 

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Some hope for migrants and refugees in the time of COVID-19? https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/12/23/some-hope-for-migrants-and-refugees-in-the-time-of-covid-19/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=some-hope-for-migrants-and-refugees-in-the-time-of-covid-19 https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/12/23/some-hope-for-migrants-and-refugees-in-the-time-of-covid-19/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:24:46 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7505 Jesse Machin

Government responses to COVID-19 have come under scrutiny since the pandemic began. Stories on issues ranging from the economic impact of national lockdowns to the effectiveness of social distancing measures dominate the media. Now that the movement of people across national borders has become a public health issue, above and beyond the long-standing ‘morality versus legality’ debate, the impact of COVID response strategies on the lives of migrants and refugees should also demand public attention.

To discuss this issue, a panel of five activists and academics recently came together in a virtual event hosted by the University of York’s Interdisciplinary Global Development Centre (IGDC) and Migration Network. Speaking in the contexts of Latin America, Europe, and the UK, the panellists made clear that problems with government attitudes towards migration go far deeper than the pandemic. Years of anti-immigrant rhetoric have made it easier to increasingly dehumanise and criminalise people on the move, reducing their freedoms and denying their basic rights. The current health crisis seems set to make an already broken system even worse. There is a danger that the emergency powers used to restrict immigration and trigger deportations will increase the use of restrictive measures even after COVID.

However, when asked what can and should be done to uphold the rights of migrants and refugees during this time, the panellists suggested that certain responses to COVID-19 could set the stage for successful long-term systemic change. We have begun to see examples of ‘positive’ government responses to the pandemic that give evidence to academics and migrants rights activists long-held claims that a different kind of immigration policy is both possible and preferable; not just for people on the move, but for society as a whole. Do these encouraging responses to COVID-19 offer some hope for permanent change?

For a long time, we have been told that the rights of migrants and the rights of citizens are at odds. It is no accident that an undesirable image of ‘the immigrant’ has been built up in the public imagination – governments who fail to take care of their people tend to look for scapegoats. As a result, the treatment of migrants and refugees in immigration systems across Europe and the West has been allowed to become increasingly inhumane. In response to these injustices, migrants’ rights activists, refugee-led advocacy groups, researchers, and academics have been agitating for alternatives to commonplace ‘hostile’ immigration measures that are intended to discourage people from crossing borders. This work has been an uphill climb; one that, in many ways, the pandemic has made even steeper.

Some governments have leaned into existing anti-immigration sentiment to present the idea that ‘migrants equal the virus’, using COVID-19 as a pretext to implement even harsher measures by applying existing laws out of context. In numerous countries, public health exception clauses have been used to block entry for vulnerable asylum seekers and trigger deportations that place lives at risk. In this way, COVID-19 has served to reinforce existing border regimes.

Throughout most of Europe, for instance, asylum claims processing was paused. Boats arriving on European shores were illegally pushed back out to sea. Denying the right to asylum violates the principle of non-refoulement, in direct contravention of international law. Closing borders may seem necessary in the context of a pandemic, but these restrictions should not apply to forced or irregular migrants and asylum seekers whose lives are particularly at risk. In these cases, the UN has determined that closing borders results in human rights violations.

A number of governments have also doubled down on their containment policies, confining irregular migrants to overcrowded and unsanitary detainment centres where the risk of an outbreak is dangerously high. The prevalence of COVID transmission among migrant and refugee communities is yet another failure of government but, as a large percentage of detention facilities and asylum hostels are run by private companies, it can be difficult to pin governments down on their responsibilities. UK asylum hostels have seen coronavirus outbreaks throughout the pandemic due to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and lack of PPE. Delays in the asylum claims system have meant that successful claims do not now result in transition out of hostels and into permanent accommodation, leaving families blocked into a stagnant system, in unfit living conditions. At the same time, the Home Office resumed evictions of asylum seekers with unsuccessful claims, acting against its own policy and the UK government’s public health advice during periods of lockdown.

Doubtless, this picture is bleak, but there are a few examples of government responses to the pandemic that offer more positive outcomes. The Commissioner for Human Rights has called for the release of immigration detainees during COVID-19; a measure that has been taken up in varying degrees across some European States, including Spain and the UK. These moves are being seen by activists as evidence that detention centres are unnecessary, prompting hope that detention could eventually be removed from the immigration policy landscape altogether.

This will not happen automatically, but with lobbying and public pressure these COVID response measures could become a first step in the right direction. John Grayson, independent researcher and adult educator with the South Yorkshire Migration and Asylum Action Group (SYMAAG), stresses the importance of a politics of solidarity that views refugees themselves as agents of change. We should not forget that refugees and migrants are part of civil society and have voices of their own.

Hope might also arise in the form of growing recognition of the vital social contributions made by workers with refugee or migrant status. Many of those who are now recognised as ‘essential workers’ do not have the right to healthcare or financial support, despite working in industries that are generally described as exploitative and precarious, both in terms of the lack of financial security and risk of exposure to COVID.

Lack of access to basic services is not a new problem for people on the move. Irregular or undocumented migrants – particularly displaced women and girls – are frequently exposed to violence when trying to access health services, and often face the threat of deportation by doing so. But the need to address the spread of coronavirus has forced governments to reconsider how resources and services are distributed. For example, the government of Portugal has temporarily granted migrants and refugees the right to healthcare, understanding that withholding access to healthcare from certain communities has harmful knock-on effects for society as a whole.

Although none of these ‘positive’ responses go far enough on their own, they can nonetheless be seen as indicators that advocates’ demands for rights to healthcare, work, housing, and asylum are viable and necessary. It is important to remember that the injustices suffered by migrants and refugees go deeper than the pandemic, and regressive responses are likely to have long-term negative consequences. Yet, we also have the opportunity to use short-term positive responses to COVID as a springboard to facilitate long-term permanent change.

We should agitate to end the use of detention centres following the release of detainees, push for economic inclusion of refugees and migrants on the strength of growing recognition of the importance of these work economies in response to the pandemic, and demand a guaranteed right to healthcare with no risk of subsequent deportation on the basis that exclusion from these services harms everyone. Dr Pia Riggirozzi, Professor of Global Politics at the University of Southampton, also argues that we should demand governments recognise their legal and ethical obligations under international law by formalising and regularising more avenues of legitimate migration.

What will it take to bring such changes about? At the close of the University of York discussion panel chaired by Dr Sara de Jong, the panellists reminded us that systemic change will require movement from the general public, as well as academics, activists, and migrant- and refugee-led advocacy groups. Emily Arnold-Fernandez, President and CEO of Asylum Access, pointed out that political rhetoric is not enough – there must be a bottom-up drive for policy-led action supported by economic strategy. These changes will also require impactful social science research to understand the diversity of migration so that policies can be targeted to meet specific needs, argued Dr Adriana Velasquez, researcher for the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Honduras. Finally, Niamh Ni Bhriain of the Transnational Institute (TNI) highlighted the need to pair critiques of current policy measures with challenges to underlying social and philosophical assumptions about the need for borders and immigration control.

In a time of such uncertainty about what life after COVID will look like, it is vital that we recognise the scale of possible damage that certain government responses could do to the rights struggles of people on the move. However, we can and should also use the positive responses to COVID to push for systemic change in the present, in the hope of securing more rights and a better quality of life for migrants and refugees throughout the post-COVID years to come.

 

Jesse Machin is a doctoral researcher at the University of York Department of Politics. Their research into the citizenship rights of stateless groups is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Cover image credit: Radek Homola. Deserted refugee camp, Calais, France. Sourced from unsplash.com

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Racism as a social determinant: COVID-19 and its impacts on racial/ethnic minorities https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/12/22/racism-as-a-social-determinant-covid-19-and-its-impacts-on-racial-ethnic-minorities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=racism-as-a-social-determinant-covid-19-and-its-impacts-on-racial-ethnic-minorities Tue, 22 Dec 2020 13:51:16 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7501 Karim Mitha, Kaveri Qureshi, Shelina Adatia, and Hiten Dodhia

As of December 21 2020, over 2.1 million individuals in the UK have tested positive for COVID-19, with approximately 76 000 deaths with the virus registered as a cause. The UK is in the midst of its second wave. Areas in England are now entering, and parts of Scotland are due to enter, the highest level of Tier 4 restrictions in response to a mutation of the COVID-19 virus increasing transmissibility. This is on the heels of what seemed a positive turn in the evolution of the pandemic with the approval and roll-out of the Pfizer vaccine in early December.

Yet, the effects of repeated lockdowns, and plans for the dissemination of vaccines, call in question issues of equity amongst those most marginalised. Indeed, as substantial commentary from the first wave noted, we are not really “all in this together” and many groups, including minority ethnic communities, have suffered disproportionately health, social, and economic impacts of COVID-19.

According to Fenton, Public Health England data from mid-September – when a second lockdown was first suggested by SAGE – showed that the highest rates of COVID-19 cases were in the Other Ethnic group (1737 per 100 000) and Pakistanis (1487 per 100 000). Those from White backgrounds have the second lowest rates (490 per 100 000 population). Data from ICNARC up to 22 October 2020 showed the substantial effect of deprivation with more than three times the number of critically ill cases in the North, North East, and Midlands coming from the most deprived backgrounds.

Mortality data from the first wave showed BAME individuals were of a younger age group (Oxford Covid-19 Data Service; ICNARC; Zakeri at al) and required greater critical care support (ICNARC; Pan et al).  Even after accounting for comorbidities and deprivation, the disproportionate burden of disease remained amongst ethnic minorities, with Black groups at greater risk of hospitalisation and Asian groups of mortality (Zakeri at al). Data from Public Health Scotland were similar, showing individuals of Asian origin having twice the rate of admission to critical care and death (see, also, Chaudhry).

In the first wave, several hypotheses explaining racial/ethnic disproportionalities emerged, focusing on more proximal levels of causation. For instance, ACE-2 inhibitors may increase the risk of acquiring SARS COV-2 with an interaction effect in certain ethnic groups where risks of COVID-19 are higher despite the use of ACE-2 inhibitors (Hippisley-Cox et al). ICNARC showed a greater proportion of admitted cases from those who were obese (BMI > 30); yet, amongst minority ethnic individuals, a greater proportion were admitted to the ICU with a lower BMI than White British. Those with lower BMIs were more likely to die in critical care. Interestingly, the same report showed, there was some evidence to suggest that ethnic minorities in the least deprived areas were less likely to be admitted to ICU (0.4x) than White British.

Public Health England’s initial report into examining ethnic inequalities in COVID-19, highlighted the extent to which these were related to underlying socio-economic inequalities. The accompanying report recognised the relevance of ‘the social and structural determinants of health’ (p.20). Nevertheless, the narrow, biomedical focus of the second report’s headline messages, and its references to factors such as ‘diet’ or Vitamin D (p.8), detracted from a coherent focus on the social and structural determinants.

Reports published by the Race Disparities Unit of the Government and  for the Opposition by Lady Lawrence in October both denied and attributed, respectively, structural racism as a contributing factor to COVID-19 mortality and morbidity amongst ethnic communities. Both reports agree that the disproportionality is connected to factors such as type of work, place of residence, and pre-existing health conditions. However, the Government’s report did not provide any explanation as to why ethnic groups should be disproportionately placed in higher risk environments, neglecting the ‘differential access to the goods, services and opportunities of society by race’ (p 1212).  It appears the Government’s focus has been to attribute causality to more proximal ‘causes’ while negating the wider, macro-social environmental influences which, for Dahlgren and Whitehead, are the elementary principles of public health. Indeed, Williams and Mohammed and Nuru-Jeter and colleagues have explained racial/ethnic disparities in health connecting the distal and proximate causes.

As noted by Bambra and colleagues, and emphasised in the Lawrence Review individuals from ethnic communities are disproportionately overrepresented in lower-paid and lower-skilled jobs, leading to heightened exposure to the virus and greater loss of income as a result of COVID-19 control measures. Individuals from ethnic groups are less likely to be part of trade unions, limiting their ability to collectively change workplace environments.. Ethnic minority communities may also experience poorer quality of care – lack of culturally-appropriate communication, misrecognition in symptom presentation, and systemic discrimination.

The Government’s endorsed recommendations, including the need to provide culturally sensitive communications, are not incorrect, but they fail to address fundamental causes. While rectifying generations of structural racism may be an arduous ask, several short-term actions can buffer ethnic communities from these fundamental causes. For example, the Hostile Environment policy and limitations of ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ mean that some migrants are ineligible for benefits or support services to support self-isolation. Both Independent SAGE and the Lawrence Review spoke of the necessity of workplaces to ensure risk assessment processes take into account comorbidities/underlying conditions amongst staff,. The Government must also take ownership regarding its engagement strategy, involving communities in decision-making about realistic protective measures. For instance, the Lawrence Review noted that ethnic minorities were seven times more likely to be fined for breaking lockdown restrictions than White individuals. Yet, the Government fails to adequately acknowledge why, choosing instead to outlaw the use and teaching of critical race theory. This closing down of debate and discussion is particularly problematic as, to ensure fair deliberative process, “process is the point” .

As Bambra and Horton have noted, COVID-19 must be considered a syndemic. As expressed by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the COVID-19 pandemic has “fallen off a deep social and economic crisis fuelled by discrimination and inequalities that existed before the pandemic. Efforts to reduce transmission must focus on risk minimisation amongst communities at higher risk, and address institutional and structural racism. This is particularly important given vaccine deployment – where high-risk groups are also the most reluctant to access mainstream services and get vaccinated. Phelan and Link  remark “understanding racism as a fundamental cause of health inequalities is important because the fundamental cause must be addressed directly  (p.325). The Faculty of Public Health’s position statement endorsed on 21st December 2020 declaring “racism is a public health crisis” outlines strongly that public health has a role to play in addressing issues of racism as influencing health inequalities. By addressing racism, and its syndemicity with COVID-19, we can protect our most vulnerable and marginalised communities.

 

Karim Mitha is Speciality Registrar in Public Health Medicine at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust, an instructor at Edinburgh Medical School, and a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. Kaveri Qureshi is a lecturer in Global Health Equity at the University of Edinburgh. Shelina Adatia is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. Hiten Dodhia is a Consultant in Public Health Medicine at Lambeth Council and an instructor in the School of Population Health and Environmental Sciences at King’s College London.

 

 

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All for Vaccination? Vaccination for All? https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/23/all-for-vaccination-vaccination-for-all/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=all-for-vaccination-vaccination-for-all https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/23/all-for-vaccination-vaccination-for-all/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2020 11:44:02 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7493 Tom Douglass and Michael Calnan

A COVID-19 vaccine has been held by governments since the beginning as the way to control the pandemic and return normal social and economic functioning. As a result, the news in November 2020 that an effective COVID-19 vaccine might be available for use by healthcare professionals and in certain vulnerable populations before the end of the year (and more widely in 2021) has caused great excitement.(1)

This said, scientific questions remain about lasting immunity created by COVID-19 vaccination and efficacy in older people.(2) There are also a vast range of manufacturing and distribution issues to be navigated in vaccinating billions of people globally. Importantly, too, the science of vaccine research and development cannot end the pandemic alone. When the efficacy and safety of a COVID-19 vaccine or vaccines can be established, social factors will play a highly significant role in the success of vaccines in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the key questions that sociologists can contribute to answering is whether people will accept COVID-19 vaccination and the associated question of whether the numbers will be high enough to achieve herd immunity (thus limiting the continued spread of the disease and protecting vulnerable people). Some initial research suggests this will vary significantly across cultural and political contexts and research in the US setting indicates that as many as one-fifth of Americans are displaying COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and may be unwilling to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.

Why might this be? What social factors shape vaccine hesitancy or outright rejection? In this vein, it is the purpose of this article to review and assert the utility of sociological knowledge about vaccines. Building on our previous work, we also want to pose a range of, as yet, unanswered questions about COVID-19 vaccination and thus offer an agenda for sociological research. Alongside exploring the social influences on vaccine hesitancy, we also argue that to effectively control the COVID-19 pandemic sociological analysis is also required of the processes of development and regulation of COVID-19 vaccines and of inequalities in the access to and availability of vaccines.

Social Influences on Vaccine Attitudes
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends that 95% of all children are vaccinated against vaccine preventable diseases. However, in 2018/2019 the UK fell short of  this target for every routine childhood vaccine. This said, vaccine refusal rates only tell some of the story, as can a focus solely on anti-vaxxers. Hesitancy about vaccines is more widespread (including people who hold doubts about safety and necessity yet may have consented to vaccines). Vaccine hesitancy is important to understand because it has the potential to turn into outright vaccine refusal in the future amongst wider numbers of people. Though critical attitudes towards vaccines are nothing new,(3) sociologists and anthropologists have accumulated a large body of research concerned with the social basis of contemporary vaccine hesitancy and refusal.

What does this research reveal? Safety is the major concern for those displaying vaccine hesitancy. However, as we argue elsewhere, vaccine hesitancy reflects a number of aspects including perceptions of risk and social responsibility, and past experiences with vaccines, pharmaceuticals, and experiences and interactions within healthcare settings more generally. Contemporary vaccine hesitancy and outright anti-vaccination sentiment are also influenced by various forms of news media, the internet, and certainly social media. Most importantly, future willingness to accept COVID-19 vaccination will also reflect levels of (dis)trust in medical professionals, healthcare and government authorities, and the pharmaceutical industry. Sociologists have argued that one strategy for building and sustaining trust at the institutional level is through policies which enhance transparency and accountability by making the public aware of uncertainties and risks rather than masking them.    

Whilst this body of knowledge allows us to predict why people might be hesitant towards a COVID-19 vaccine, a large proportion of the research on attitudes towards vaccines is concerned with parental decision-making. It is not necessarily clear if and how parental attitudes about vaccination are reflected more generally. It is also unclear how the special circumstances of COVID-19, namely the vast social and economic disruption it has caused, might shape public willingness to accept COVID-19 vaccination compared with other diseases where health, social and economic threats are less immediately obvious (at least at this point in time). In a possible context where COVID-19 vaccination is required multiple times to develop or sustain immunity, these questions are perhaps particularly important.

Vaccine Development and Regulation
To what extent can vaccine manufacturers be relied on to develop vaccines that position global public health as the primary interest? At a general level, there has been concern that guidance on minimum standards for a COVID-19 vaccine produced by the WHO (including 50% efficacy levels and comparison between vaccines rather than solely against placebo) might be ignored in the haste for a vaccine.(4)

Equally, though some companies have received public money and promised not to profit from COVID-19 vaccine development, at least at this stage, others have invested their own money into vaccine development and are treating it as a commercial opportunity. The combination of the rush to develop a vaccine alongside the lure of billions in potential profits could result in a suboptimal vaccine creating only short lived immunity and/or the curtailment of ongoing trials of potentially better vaccines.

There are also questions about the relationships between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, regulators and governments. To what extent does COVID-19 represent a unique regulatory situation? In this regard, regulators have launched rolling reviews of vaccine data to attempt to shorten approval times. Equally, some of the vaccines being developed are a new type which have never been approved before.

More generally, is the regulatory apparatus sufficiently independent to ensure the safety, efficacy and quality of vaccines? Sociologists have long shown how relationships between the regulatory state and pharmaceutical companies have biased science away from the public interest. The regulation of pharmaceuticals has, in this regard, been argued to be underpinned by neoliberal corporate bias where companies have established privileged influence within regulatory procedures. Sociological research is required to assess the extent to which corporate bias might be present in COVID-19 vaccine regulation, to chart the specific impacts and influences of commercial (and political) interests, and to assess the associated extent to which global regulatory standards are upheld. Sociological research can also reveal the range of the forms of uncertainty that exist in regulation as well as how they are managed.

Governments and various forms of media have throughout the pandemic placed and fostered great hope that a safe and effective vaccine can and will be developed – that vaccine science can ultimately prevail to preserve life and restore normal social and economic functioning. In this regard, there are questions to be asked in the sociologies of hope and expectations about how these phenomena are reflected in or have structured responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this regard, the role of hope in the ability to attract vast levels of funding and government willingness to share the financial risks of vaccine development with pharmaceutical/biotechnology companies should be explored.

Trust and hope are means of bridging uncertainty, but specific uncertainties that are perhaps less well mediated by trust and hope exist in relation to the implications of a ‘hard’ Brexit (with the transition period ending on 1st January 2021). Brexit could have a damaging effect on supply chains and result in long delays in accessing vaccines manufactured on the continent. The impacts of Brexit will need to be considered as part of broader analyses of all the moving parts of the pandemic and attempts to manufacture and distribute vaccines.

Vaccination Programmes: Access and Availability
Assuming the availability of a safe and effective vaccination, there will be need for sociological analysis and policy evaluation of vaccination programmes. How might national and international inequalities shape availability and access to vaccines? The whole world is going to require access to a vaccine. But there has been concern that vaccine nationalism, where governments sign agreements with vaccine manufacturers to supply their own populations first, might mean that poorer countries have to wait or cannot afford a vaccine.

The COVID-19 Global Access (COVAX) initiative, co-led by the WHO, is seen by some as the solution to the problem of vaccine nationalism. It has been signed by 172 countries to create a global advanced market commitment for vaccines which will ostensibly protect low-and middle-income countries. However, the US (under President Trump) has opted out and, when supplies are divided up between countries doses could be insufficient. There are a range of vaccines that have received investment via COVAX, but it unclear how easy it will be to ethically and political navigate the distribution to different countries of vaccines that potentially show different levels of efficacy. Equally, signing up to COVAX does not prevent rich countries from striking their own deals (which could create pressures in the supply chain and drive prices up). The damages of the COVID-19 pandemic have not been felt by all countries equally, and neither, it seems, will the benefits of vaccines. These issues will require empirical investigation.

There are also important comparative questions to be asked about how public and private healthcare systems provide access to vaccines and how existing inequalities within countries shape who or how quickly someone can be vaccinated. Equally, there are ethical questions requiring exploration about the order in which people might receive vaccines. Healthcare professionals and the elderly are first in line for a vaccine. However, in the UK, COVID-19 has exacerbated existing inequalities. There have been disproportionate impacts regionally, on ethnic minorities, and on the poor which have not been reflected in initial vaccine prioritisation order.

Notes:

  1. Pfizer (in partnership with BioNTech) were the first to announce that they had developed an effective vaccine and were very close to having compiled enough efficacy and safety data to seek regulatory approval for their vaccine (and is now under review in the US), followed by biotechnology company Moderna. Many more are in the preclinical or clinical trial phases of development.
  2. Early evidence suggests that COVID-19 vaccines have produced strong immune responses in older people.
  3. See Calnan and Douglass, 2020 for a discussion of the history of vaccination and the persistence of vaccine critical attitudes.
  4. Pfizer and Moderna have both claimed their vaccines have over 90% efficacy – but this needs to be verified by regulators.

 

Tom Douglass is a sociologist and a Research Associate in the School of Communication and Media at Ulster University and Michael Calnan is a Professor of Medical Sociology in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.

Image: Christian Emmer (emmer.com.ar) CC BY-NC 4.0

 

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From soldiers to scapegoats: Why blaming citizens in the pandemic may help extremist parties https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/from-soldiers-to-scapegoats-why-blaming-citizens-in-the-pandemic-may-help-extremist-parties/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=from-soldiers-to-scapegoats-why-blaming-citizens-in-the-pandemic-may-help-extremist-parties Wed, 04 Nov 2020 07:30:37 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7475 Mario Bisiada

This article is born out of personal frustration, a feeling that, I believe, is shared by many these days. While university teaching in many European countries was resigned to being online many months ago, my university, as most in Spain, had trumpeted a “hybrid” approach, guaranteeing face-to-face teaching for small groups and online teaching for bigger ones. I was excited to see students in person again, we had strict hygiene protocols and I believe we could have demonstrated that safe in-class teaching is possible. The Catalan government pulled the plug after one week of teaching, allegedly to reduce student mobility. To add insult to injury, the announcement came in a radio interview and before the closure of anything else was mentioned, with no consultation or appreciation of the academic community’s efforts. Student demands to reverse the decision weren’t heard.

As Catalonia enters another shutdown of social and cultural life, politicians across Spain say the restrictions are necessary because people have “relaxed” too much. Such discourses attributing blame to citizens have been shown to exist in Britain and Germany. An analysis of the UK finds, among other things, that “the mostly pro-regime press has been hard at work, ensuring that the powerful aren’t the subject of people’s wrath, but that our so-called ‘covidiot’ neighbours are blamed instead”. The Dutch “partial lockdown” is also blamed on people no longer following the rules − which is odd because a recent analysis claimed that the Dutch “intelligent lockdown” works precisely because it doesn’t rely on rules, but on giving people responsibility, an effect apparently linked to the Dutch national character.

While the beginning of the pandemic was marked by warlike discourse, constructing a situation of an “all-bets-are-off, anything-goes approach to emerging victorious”, addressing citizens as “soldiers” to rally them together to “fight” the “invisible enemy”, the discourses surrounding the “second wave” have little to do with community and more with mutual recrimination. Having left war metaphors behind, politicians, helped by a largely sensationalist media, pit people against each other, identifying particular groups such as migrants, youths or “deniers” and placing blame on them for each surge in cases. The importance of language in this pattern follows depressingly closely what Philip Strong argued in his 1990 landmark article Epidemic psychology: “Language’s fundamental role in the construction of human society can, therefore, explain much of the societal potential for epidemic psychology. The first form of that psychology, the epidemic of fear and suspicion is, at bottom, an unusually powerful pathology of social interaction. No social order can last long when basic assumptions about interaction are disrupted, when every participant fears the other, or suspects that the other may fear them. Fatal epidemics have the potential, in theory at least, to create a medical version of the Hobbesian nightmare: the war of all against all.”

Having left war metaphors behind, politicians’ tone is now paternalistic, often drawing on educational framings, casting themselves as authoritative teachers and citizens as unruly students who don’t want to behave. “Too many people are not keeping to the rules. Then we have no choice but to take tougher measures to make sure that we can no longer meet each other”, said Dutch president Mark Rutte when he announced his “partial lockdown”. I’m reminded here of class trips when we played football in the corridors instead of sleeping. As befits any pedagogical framing, voices are stating that people just “aren’t doing their homework” on coronavirus.

Not surprisingly perhaps, discourses blaming citizens have never been supported by any evidence or justification. They seem to be carried mainly by cultural stereotypes about “Latin people” lax in understanding or freedom-loving Britons and social media users posting finger-pointing photos of crammed subway trains, park barbecues or bar terraces. Where there is data, as for instance in the UK, the “general message from the data is most people want to comply with the guidance and they tend to comply with the guidance”. A related notion now making the rounds in press articles is that of “pandemic fatigue”, according to which people generally have suffered so much that they become tired of the rules. Though the effect is real, as surveys show, it is now increasingly pathologised as something that’s somehow our responsibility to overcome (“7 steps to reduce pandemic fatigue”, “fatigue-fighting foods can help you combat pandemic stress”).

The lockdown, always present as a Sword of Damocles, went from being our instrument in the fight against the virus, to now being threatened with as some kind of phenomenon brought on naturally by the virus if people don’t behave. What is evident here is that none of this is about protecting health, but rather about avoiding economic damage that another lockdown would cause. In the same vein, schools aren’t kept open because education is seen as important (witness the fact that universities are usually the first to be closed), but to keep children occupied so their parents can work. This was stated clearly by German health minister Jens Spahn in a recent interview: “we have to abstain in our private lives so that schools, childcare and the economy can stay open”.

The discourse of blame frames people as passive rather than active, as patients who need to be told what to do rather than agents who may have an interest themselves in fighting the pandemic. It implies a stance whereby the restrictions are happening to people along with the pandemic, and that people act only as and when instructed by governments. Paradoxically, it even seems to imply that this action happens against their will, and is never enough.

Why is the default assumption that citizens work against their own good in the pandemic? Politicians assuming the role of fed-up teachers are seen all over Europe. That position is may be taken by people who know what they’re doing, for instance, teachers who do the same course every year, who know what certain behaviours lead to. Nothing like this can be said about politicians in this crisis: they know as little as citizens. The only difference is that they have the power to dictate laws and restrict freedoms (a power that judges across Europe have thankfully been working hard to keep in check). Politicians in this crisis have no moral or epistemological justification to cast themselves into the role of teachers.

I want to propose a somewhat different account. The last time I wrote in this magazine, we knew nothing about the pandemic, and any measure was welcome to buy time. Seven months later, we’ve learnt quite a few things, and judgement on politicians who apply the same blanket measures from seven months ago has to be considerably harsher. The most important finding is probably that aerosols in closed spaces are more dangerous than previously believed. A letter published in Science states that “aerosols containing infectious virus can […] accumulate in poorly ventilated indoor air. […] Thus one is far more likely to inhale aerosols than be sprayed by a droplet, and so the balance of attention must be shifted to protecting against airborne transmission. In addition to existing mandates of mask-wearing, social distancing, and hygiene efforts, we urge public health officials to add clear guidance about the importance of moving activities outdoors […].”

This not only means outdoor areas are rather safe, but also that, as public transport stops frequently and opens doors, it is safer than many believe. Surface contagion is also not a significant factor.

Little of this knowledge seems to be reflected by recent measures affecting us: A distinction between inside and outside areas is generally not made, park closures continue to happen, educational and cultural institutions with comprehensive hygiene protocols, but also outdoor social areas in bars, are shut indiscriminately. None of the restrictions we’ve seen can be shown to have had an actual effect. Many of them are consistently toppled by courts, who, in the absence of a functioning political opposition and a critical press, are the only safeguards of basic freedoms and rights. To put it bluntly, most politicians have no idea what they’re doing.

Few scientists have stated this as straightforwardly as the Catalan epidemiologist and strategic advisor Oriol Mitjà, who, in a recent interview, blamed the “dangerously incompetent” Catalan government for having caused Covid-19 deaths. His main argument is that a great number of deaths could have been avoided, had the government invested in personnel to conduct contact tracing and fast antibody tests. Only once this approach has failed does he support restrictive measures, as an ultimate solution.

In a similar vein, WHO Regional Director for Europe, Hans Kluge, has argued that “the pandemic of today is not the pandemic of yesterday, not only in terms of its transmission dynamic but in the ways we are now equipped to face it”, thus a lockdown can now only mean a “stepwise escalation of proportionate, targeted and time-limited measures. Measures in which all of us are engaged both as individuals and as a society together in order to minimize collateral damage to our health, our economy and our society.”

A week before, he stated that “understanding the behavioural needs of young people returning to university to the emotional toll isolation has taken in elderly care homes, policy must be driven by the growing body of evidence we have on people’s behaviours” and also called for drawing on experts beyond the medical and public health sectors when discussing measures: “In Germany, the government has consulted philosophers, historians, theologians, and behavioural and social scientists, who provided valuable input on the educational progress of children from disadvantaged families, the legitimacy of restrictions, and the balance between public support and moral norms versus coercive state action.”

It’s safe to say that none of the sweeping closures, night-time curfews or travel bans we’re seeing again these days are congruent with the above demands. The restrictions do not involve the public, are rarely backed up by clear evidence or scientific findings and usually don’t take sociological considerations into account. They boil down to a brute force attempt to quash social life in order to get infection rates down at all costs. The public pressure thus generated has led to a polarisation between #staythefuckhome self-isolators and Trumpian anti-maskers, where the only choices seem to be “lockdown” or “herd immunity”, while neither of those terms are actually clearly defined by any description, and the toxicity of the whole debate has become too high for scientists to speak out.

People everywhere are discussing solutions and measures, in more or less informed ways. What some call “fatigue” could also be called a demand for measured responses, properly planned and communicated, backed up by evidence and easy to follow, keeping restrictions to rights and freedoms to a necessary minimum. People no longer support indiscriminate, wholesale restrictions that we had at the beginning and that are now being applied again.

This is essentially a democratic, participative phenomenon. Ignoring this phenomenon, patronising or pathologising it by slapping the “pandemic fatigue” label on it is seriously misreading it and will eventually play into the hands of extremist parties who are intelligent enough to know where to recruit their followers. The infantilisation of people can have an unwanted effect, as anyone who has ever taught knows. If you constantly tell people off even though they’re making an effort, if you don’t trust them and send belittling messages, they will eventually reject the entire scenario, which may be one reason why the amount of Covid-19 deniers is increasing steadily, as argued convincingly by Adam Ramsey.

The discourse of constant blame, part of the wider phenomenon that political scientist Wolfgang Merkel calls governance by fear, do not seem to consider the idea that citizens might have a will to work together to get through the pandemic, to protect each other, but also to return to a certain normality, to support their families, to continue to follow their passions and vocations, to cater to the human need to socialise, to guarantee an amount of sanity, finds no space in these views. It is a fundamentally antidemocratic discourse and must thus be challenged. To say it again in the words of Hans Kluge, “it is essential that we respond together and that communities own response policies with authorities. Consultation, participation and an acknowledgement of the hardships that people are facing are key if we are to have truly effective policies. The community should be considered a resource, as well as a recipient or beneficiary” (emphasis added). This, in my view, is just not happening, anywhere.

 

Mario Bisiada is a lecturer, Facultat de Traducció I Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Image: Tim Dennell

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We are taking a break! https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/we-are-taking-a-break/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=we-are-taking-a-break Wed, 04 Nov 2020 07:15:04 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7480 We are taking a break!

After seven years and over fourteen hundred articles, Discover Society is having a rest from publishing the regular monthly magazine. We will be back in the new year, but in the meantime we will continue to publish articles in our Covid-19 Chronicles.

Proposed submissions should be sent to one of the following email addresses: john.holmwood[at]nottingham.ac.uk
suescott69[at]icloud.com
g.k.bhambra[at]sussex.ac.uk

 

Gurminder, John, and Sue

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DID BEHAVIOURAL SCIENCE COST LIVES? EVIDENCE-BASED POLICYMAKING DURING THE PANDEMIC https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/did-behavioural-science-cost-lives-evidence-based-policymaking-during-the-pandemic/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=did-behavioural-science-cost-lives-evidence-based-policymaking-during-the-pandemic https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/did-behavioural-science-cost-lives-evidence-based-policymaking-during-the-pandemic/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2020 07:00:51 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7456 Martyn Hammersley

During the pandemic, the UK Government’s policymaking has approximated more closely to the evidence-based model than in normal times. Ministers have repeatedly insisted that they are ‘following the science’ and that policies are ‘data-driven’. And, beyond the rhetoric, scientific evidence has clearly played a rather more direct role in shaping policymaking than is usually the case. This has arisen because dealing with the pandemic has been the central political issue for many months, and because this is a public health issue for which expert knowledge is patently required.

Distinctive amongst the kinds of evidence used has been that from ‘behavioural science’, a relatively new interdisciplinary field relying heavily on psychology and behavioural economics. And, early on in the pandemic, this was a focus of controversy as a result of a dispute about the risk of ‘behavioural fatigue’, the suggestion that lockdown restrictions must not be introduced too early because the public would soon tire of them, with compliance declining before the peak of the pandemic was reached. While the concept of behavioural fatigue was reported in the media as coming from behavioural science, it was subsequently publicly disowned by many behavioural scientists. This incident nicely illustrates some of the challenging issues surrounding the relationship between scientific evidence and policymaking, not just during a pandemic but more generally.

While Government leaders and their supporters have been keen to insist that their policies are based on scientific evidence, and the media have often questioned whether this is true, there are several reasons why any such direct relationship can be no more than fantasy (see Hammersley 2002, 2013). It has become increasingly clear over the course of the pandemic that there are many sources of uncertainty and disagreement around the evidence informing Government policymaking and its role.

One stems from the fact that scientific results, even in relatively well-established and consensual fields, are always fallible and open to change, with the findings of different studies sometimes in conflict. A second is that a routine feature of all scientific evidence is a margin of error. This is true in epidemiology, for example, and it can cause considerable difficulties in determining the scale of a pandemic and how it is likely to develop. Furthermore, slight changes in the information fed into epidemiological models can produce quite divergent findings, and there are multiple groups of modellers who use somewhat different approaches, these varying in the assumptions involved, and therefore producing rather different results. One problematic area here concerns the nature of people’s social contacts; often the assumptions about these are necessarily crude and at best would only approximate to aggregate patterns, fitting some sections of the population better than others.

Evidence about the likely effectiveness of different policy measures in dealing with the pandemic is also fraught with uncertainty. This is where behavioural science offers to make a contribution. However, human behaviour is a good deal more complex and variable than that of a virus, so that knowing what are the main factors contributing to the spread of infection and what would reduce it is even more challenging than producing reliable epidemiological evidence. As a result, the scope for divergent views is greater.

Another source of uncertainty is the penumbra of inference and judgment that surrounds the policy implications of any scientific evidence. The data employed in scientific studies rarely relate directly to the particular situation with which policymakers are dealing, and this means that inferences have to be made from the findings to the new situation about which decisions are to be reached. For example, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was relatively little research data relating specifically to this virus. In assessing the likely effects of various policies, reliance often had to be placed on research concerning previous pandemics, with adjustments made for what was known about the distinctive characteristics of the new virus.

There is also the problem that scientific evidence may be available in relation to some aspects of the problems faced, but not in relation to others. So, while there is evidence about the effects of lockdowns in previous pandemics, there is less about the effects of variation in the scope and character of lockdowns. Similarly, while there can be evidence about the effectiveness of particular measures, there may be little about how these would operate when used in different combinations.

Of more fundamental significance is the difference between scientific evidence and scientific advice. If we take the relatively straightforward case of epidemic modelling, its results are predictions about the scale and distribution of the epidemic across a population. In themselves, these predictions do not indicate how serious the problem is or what ought to be done. In fact, they do not – on their own – even tell us that there is a problem that needs tackling. In order to identify something as a problem, some value-judgments need to be made about the significance of what the science reports. And these can result in divergent policy conclusions. For instance, if we believe that the best way of dealing with an epidemic, in the absence of a vaccine, is to allow it to spread through the population so as to build up herd immunity, then (in extreme terms) the faster it is spreading the better, and nothing should be done to stop it.

A hitherto neglected aspect of the notion of evidence-based policymaking has come to the surface during the pandemic. This is that, to the extent that government policy is based on scientific advice, those supplying that advice, and those providing the evidence underpinning it, are potentially accountable for any policy failings. It is tempting to see Government ministers’ insistence that they are ‘following the science’ in cynical terms, as simply passing the buck – it is reminiscent of the old Irish joke: ‘Follow me, I’m right behind you’ (O’Connor 1995). However, to the extent that they have had to take account of scientific evidence, some responsibility is necessarily shared with those producing that evidence and turning it into advice. The debate around the notion of ‘behavioural fatigue’ nicely illustrates this.

Early on in the pandemic, a briefing was apparently given by David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a.k.a the ‘nudge unit’, warning of the risk of behavioural fatigue. While it is now a private company, BIT was originally part of the UK Government, and was responsible for introducing behavioural science directly into the policymaking process, developing the idea of ‘behavioural government’. This raises an interesting question about who belongs in the category of ‘scientists’ and who in that of ‘Government’ (a question that could also be asked about the Chief Medical Officer, the Chief Scientific Officer, and their deputies). Yet this is crucial for any understanding of the relationship between the two.

When the idea of behavioural fatigue was floated, a large number of behavioural scientists (some of whom were on Government advisory committees for the pandemic) wrote an open letter questioning the concept and expressing concern about the delay in introducing a lockdown. One commentator suggested that ‘Halpern was briefing on what essentially looks like his opinion as if it were science’. This touches on the point made earlier about the difference between evidence and advice, but also raises the issue of whether the notion of behavioural fatigue was based on research evidence or was simply a piece of common-sense reasoning. This, in turn, prompts the question of what role each of these plays, and should play, in scientific advice, especially in the behavioural field.

Government ministers have usually denied that there was any delay in instituting a lockdown, insisting that everything was ‘done to plan’; or they have rejected the idea that the timing of the lockdown caused increased loss of life. However, if there is ever an official inquiry into the handling of the pandemic, scientists as well as politicians may find themselves in the firing line. For their sake, and for other reasons too, it is to be hoped that such an inquiry would take account of the complexities of the relationship between scientific evidence and policymaking.

References:
Hammersley, M. (2002) Educational Research, Policymaking and Practice, London, Paul Chapman/Sage.
Hammersley, M. (2013) The Myth of Research-Based Policy and Practice, London, Sage.
O’Connor, T. (1995) Follow Me, I’m Right Behind You: A treasury of Irish humour, London, Robson Books.

 

Martyn Hammersley is Professor Emeritus at the Open University. A longer version of this piece is here.

Image: The Noun Project (CC-BY-3.0)

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FOCUS: UK’s first migrant camps – hope and hate waiting by the gates https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/focus-uks-first-migrant-camps-hope-and-hate-waiting-by-the-gates/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=focus-uks-first-migrant-camps-hope-and-hate-waiting-by-the-gates Wed, 04 Nov 2020 06:14:18 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7443 Raoul Walawalker

Enclosed within chained-linked fencing topped with barbed wire, the UK government has created its first ‘migrant camps’ at two former army facilities; one is a training camp in Wales, the other is Napier Barracks near Folkestone in Kent. The move has caused waves of local tensions as well as serious health and legal concerns since the middle of September.

Hostile protestors and welcoming counter-groups have gathered in front of the camps, and local newspapers have reported daily on divided opinions, occasional crime, statements of local MPs and councillors, and the occasional abuse of them, too – all connected to the camps.

The camp in Penally is reportedly expect to hold around 230 asylum seekers, all males aged between 18 and 35, and while this number is tiny by international comparisons, the facility is tiny too, and in proximity to a local village that’s also tiny, with a population of slightly over 800, many said to be retired.

Within the small camp, the migrants have repeatedly voiced concerns over the impossibility of social distancing in their cramped conditions, said to be ‘six to a small room.’ They worry over insulating themselves from the cold weather, while despairing at being told they may be held in the ex-army camp for a year despite many having fled from war-affected zones. While the camp was formerly used by the army, it was never designed for long-term use.

The Welsh government has made its opposition to the camp clear to the UK Home Office, with deputy minister Jane Hutt saying in a statement: “The camp does not meet the basic human needs of people seeking a new life in the UK. It places people in accommodation, which is neither designed nor appropriate for long-term use – mainly poorly insulated huts – and risks re-traumatising many vulnerable people who may have been fleeing abuse and torture.”

Hutt has said that the Home Office denied repeated requests to delay the use of the camp to ensure plans were in place with local services to enable them to prepare for the arrival of asylum seekers, particularly to make sure Covid-19 public health measures were in place.  She said this didn’t happen, and also that the plans are also the direct opposite of Wales’ Nation of Sanctuary framework.

“We involve asylum seekers in our plans and seek to integrate people into communities from day one of their arrival in Wales.

“We seek to prevent the most harmful outcomes, such as re-traumatisation and hate crime, while aiming for long-term solutions.

“The Home Office’s decision to use Penally camp does none of these things and is incompatible with the Welsh Government’s approach to inclusive and cohesive communities,” she said.

The barracks near Folkestone, meanwhile, is to hold 400, all young males too, some arriving from other temporary accommodation. Reportedly, they are in dormitories holding 32, with 16 along each wall, making social distancing an immediate concern. In mid-October, The Guardian reported on one Covid-19 case at the camp and that dozens were being quarantined, along with problems of sanitation and hygiene, as well as those of access to treatment and advice.

With locals expressing concerns ranging from fears of crime or terrorism, or complaining over lack of consultation, taxpayer cost or damage to property values – other citizens, charities and human rights organisations are concerned over just how bad the conditions in the camps have been allowed to be, familiar with the UK’s ongoing ‘hostile environment’ policy, and a current rapid deportation agenda, even before accounting for the coronavirus pandemic and the winter ahead.

Charities allowed inside the buildings have so far repeatedly assessed the camps to be unacceptable on both health and mental health grounds and accessibility to care and treatment. Human rights and immigration lawyers, meanwhile, have also been highlighting the problems accessing legal assistance.

Regarding both safety and security, charities, lawyers and supporters of migrant rights have all also expressed their concerns over renewed far-right and anti-migrant campaigning activity. This began flaring over summer, and now occurs with protesters travelling to the camps, some presenting threats of direct abuse. They’ve also mentioned that they’ve had trouble themselves from these groups while trying to get into the buildings.

The latest attentions of far-right activists link mostly to the attention that’s been given to migrants crossing from France, which they believe to both a very high number and ‘illegal.’ They’ve also been incensed by reports of migrants staying in hotels, with rumours spread of a variedly huge cost, or that as many as 48,000 have been in hotels. Truer estimates are around 1000 in temporary accommodation.

And while this year has been marked by heavy news coverage of the significant rise in channel boat crossings, the less reported government data in 2020 actually shows that the key migration numbers are in decline, with a particularly steep fall in last few months.

In the year to June, passenger arrivals dropped by 29% against the same time last year, and by 97% in the second quarter against the same period the year before due to covid-19 travel restrictions. Visas granted dropped by 29% year-on-year, 72% of which reflected the fall in student visas; work visas dropped 22% on year.

While coverage of boat crossings was heavy in the second quarter, and indeed this year has seen a big rise in this form of transit, applications for asylum nonetheless dropped by a sharp 40% in the second quarter to 4,850 against 8,455 in the first quarter, with overall applications for the year to June down 8% compared to last year.

Consequently, 2020 immigration data simply reflect anomalies – a rise in boat crossings, yes, in large part due to the 97% shutdown of any other mode of inbound travel, but with decreasing numbers seeking asylum overall. Hence, beyond a big increase in the mode of migration transit, and a lack of contextualising, there might seem little else to agitate nationalist groups currently other than ‘hype.’

While the usual right-wing news outlets have been reporting heavily on boat crossing, the extent of anti-migrant media editorial content hasn’t been at the level of a few years ago. This time ‘people-smugglers’ are also taking a bigger part of their condemnation.

Meanwhile, with well over a million Twitter followers and cosy relationships with four national newspapers, anti-migration-campaigner-in-chief Nigel Farage played a significant motivational role again this year – able to break law by travelling to Dover during lockdown to create campaign videos, which he defended as ‘journalism’ in April.

In later campaigning in July, again presented as ‘investigative journalism,’ Farage also managed to legitimise – at least in the minds of his supporters – a right to enter hotels believed to be housing migrants to challenge them. This was unproven stories of tens of thousands of asylum seekers in hotels at gigantic costs.

A ten-minute video, showing a blazered Farage reciting unsourced figures mostly from his chauffeur-driven car, proved not only popular but inspired copycatting: Far-right activists such as Britain First soon also started filming themselves entering hotels to hunt down asylum seekers, claiming it to be of public interest.

With Brexit talks and US elections taking precedent, Farage has seemingly grown bored for now of inspiring hostility to immigrants. But other significant influencers such as Migration Watch UK or the newly-led UKIP are still very actively fanning anti-migrant flames, even travelling to the new camps to do so.

Wilful or unconscious absence of scrutiny tends to explain how a right-wing organisation can routinely produce distorted information for verbatim quotation by sympathetic right-wing newspapers who’d normally describe an organisation like Migration Watch UK as an ‘independent research group,’ even though it’s known as one of the most ‘vehemently anti-migrant’ pressure groups in the UK.

The organisation, as with UKIP, has helped to convince its followers of the essential ‘illegality’ of the migrants arriving by dingy as opposed to their presentation as vulnerable refugees.

A look at a recent press release over the new camp in Wales from formerly disgraced ex-Conservative MP Neil Hamilton, now UKIP’s leader in Wales and MS for Mid and West Wales, reflects this almost parodically. With a title demanding the UK government ‘get a grip on illegal immigration and bogus asylum-seekers’ as ‘Penally pays the price,’ Hamilton inserts the word ‘bogus’ before ‘asylum seeker’ four times, while using either the word ‘illegal’ or ‘mass’ before each use of the word ‘immigration,’ in his brief press statement.

It’s a message he’s also taken down directly to the Penally camp, blasting it to local crowds by megaphone. While his own self-made video hasn’t received much attention, videos of his speech are heavily shared on social media by groups and individuals visiting Penally.

Migration Watch, meanwhile, with the identical line as UKIP, reinforces this message by seeking to factually back up the illegality accusations at all opportunity, recently using a statement by the Home Secretary to establish a claim that ‘four out of five channel-crossing migrants are not entitled to claim asylum here.’

The claim is a paraphrasing interpretation of comments made by Home Secretary Priti Patel that are based on the assumption of the UK’s immediate application of the Dublin III Regulations to the majority migrants arriving via the channel. This in itself has nothing to do with the legitimacy of their right to claim UK asylum, making the claim misleading.

Amnesty International explains: “Neither the 1951 Refugee Convention nor EU law requires a refugee to claim asylum in one country rather than another.

“There is no rule requiring refugees to claim in the first safe country in which they arrive. The EU does run a system – called the Dublin Regulations – which allows one EU country to require another to accept responsibility for an asylum claim where certain conditions apply.

“The relevant conditions include that the person is shown to have previously entered that other EU country or made a claim there.”

While aimed at making the asylum system more equitably balanced, the Dublin Regulations have been criticised because of they’ve been used mostly to the advantage of some countries, like the UK, while being unfair to others, like Italy and Greece.

But with the UK’s exit from the EU in January, and the end of the facility to apply the Dublin Regulations, the Home Office is now trying hell for leather to deport as many migrants as it can before then, especially those arriving from over the channel, aiming for a 1000 by the end of the year.

Legal interventions following gross oversight, or denials or abuses of rights have ensued, with charities also presenting evidence of efforts to frustrate access to legal advice in what they see as the government’s haste-driven campaign.

“The UK’s stated commitment to Human Rights is being trampled on by Priti Patel, the UK Home Office and this government. They have designed a Dover to Deportation pipeline, at every stage frustrating refugees’ ability to get the legal advice, care and support they need,” said Karen Doyle, National Organiser at the rights group Movement for Justice, in an October statement.

“This government is pursuing a relentless and dishonest campaign to vilify refugees and those who support and represent them. It has an incited an epidemic of race hatred and attacks, like the recent attempt to murder an immigration lawyer and fascists targeting places where refugees are being housed,” added Movement for Justice Chair Antonia Bright.

Speaking of vilification, Migration Watch has also been visiting the camp at Napier Barrack to conduct its own surveillance on the asylum seekers, in what seems an attempt to show them doing something that could garner criticism before uploading videos of them – so far essentially doing nothing of note – to social media.

Presumably bored with videoing the camp, Migration Watch’s CO Ben Loughnane at some point seemed to have got more impressed with the PSPO anti-social behaviour signboards in Folkestone (they ban various activities and use formal words for emptying the bowels and bladder – this grabs his attention), prompting him to upload a picture of one and encourage viewers to think the signs are connected to the migrant camp, even though it’s obviously not. Consultation on the zones would have predated the camp’s current use by a few years and the order came into effect in 2019. But while their fictitious connection to asylum seekers is what the rights group Movement for Justice might describe as ‘campaigning to vilify,’ it also seems to be the most popular snap of his surveillance tour, getting hundreds of likes and retweets, and showing what a little ‘creativity with truth’ can do.

Given that watching a migrant camp from outside would ultimately become very dull, it can only be hoped that at least some of any visiting hatemongers, whether of the blazered, suited or Swastika-tattooed variety, might somehow find a moment to genuinely wonder what it might be like to be living inside the place. What it’d be like to be there for an undefined period, under the authority of a contractor than can only maximise its profits by keeping its costs as low as possible – which means making lives as meagre as possible – or a government, whose policy is designed to make you feel like a prisoner or on parole while existing below subsistence level – possibly then bending rules to deport you as soon as possible to hit a target – mostly for the sake of headlines. That’s before contemplating the experiences from which they’re seeking refuge.

Some won’t stop to imagine this, no doubt, not even for a moment, opting instead to spout a narrative which they’re not likely to stop to verify either. But who knows, there’s always a chance one or more might. You can hope so.

 

Raoul Walawalker is feature writer at ImmiNews, part of an organisation of UK and Ireland immigration lawyers currently offering free legal advice to all NHS staff amid the coronavirus pandemic.

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Viewpoint: FESTIVAL OF DISTURBANCES – An Independent, artist-led review Prevent Strategy https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/11/04/viewpoint-festival-of-disturbances-an-independent-artist-led-review-prevent-strategy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=viewpoint-festival-of-disturbances-an-independent-artist-led-review-prevent-strategy Wed, 04 Nov 2020 06:13:18 +0000 http://archive.discoversociety.org/?p=7467 Julia Farrington

The government has suspended its promised Independent Review of Prevent midway through its gathering of evidence. It has so far failed to appoint a new Reviewer following the departure of Lord Carlile in December 2019, when a judicial review found his government appointment lacked credibility. In this piece for Discover Society, Julia Farrington, freelance arts producer and former Head of Arts at Index on Censorship, proposes that, given the limitations of the government’s performance to date, artists should be invited to engage directly in the theatre of politics and reframe the terms and conditions of the review. By mapping out how she, as a producer, would approach the delivery of ‘A Festival of Disturbances’ she engages the power of the arts to disturb settled judgement, critique the policy itself and provoke new ways of thinking.

This article is written as a fantasy application to Unfundable UK, an imagined funder. To frame the piece, the article opens with the announcement of a call for proposals from Unfundable UK, and the central text is an expression of interest written in response. This is supported by three further documents: the answer to the question ‘Why are you best placed to deliver this work’ as requested by the funder; and two additional documents to help the panel understand the content and methodology of the proposal. These supporting documents are:  Julia’s re-drafting of Lord Carlile’s original Terms and Conditions published in September 2019, and Julia’s Report for Index on Censorship submitted to the Independent Prevent Review in December 2019.

Together these texts can be read as a statement of intent: in the opinion of the author an artist led review is a serious and practicable proposition. As this article illustrates there is a substantial body of work out there that could be brought together into a dynamic festival programme.  However, Julia also acknowledges that the work cited in the article is only the tip of the iceberg – there is much more work out there, or ideas waiting to be realised.

To help make this proposal more substantial and representative, we are sending out a call to artists for work to further illustrate and inform an actual, as opposed to a fantasy application:

Either – submit examples of existing work that addresses Prevent Strategy
Or – ideas for new work, could be considered for commission.

Please note: If A Festival of Disturbances were to become a reality, it would be programmed by a curator, with the support of an advisory group.

Please send your ideas or examples of your work to: festivalofdisturbances@gmail.com

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Unfundable UK announces a call for applications from artists, curators and producers
Unfundable UK, a new coalition of funders who support civil society initiatives, is delighted to announce its inaugural arts funding programme and to send out a call to artists, curators and producers for submissions.

We recognise the invaluable role of artists to illuminate the society we live in, and, at this time of assault on fundamental rights, we want to support work that aims to make a significant contribution to the work of civil society: to call power to account, to illuminate the relationship between state and citizen, and the impact of legislation and government policy on the lives of ordinary people in this country.

As our name suggests we are encouraging practitioners to present us with those ideas that might ordinarily get shelved because they are too political, high-risk, provocative or appear unfeasible. We want to hear the idea first and worry about the budget later.

Please send in an expression of interest describing your project, making it clear both why you think your project would normally be considered unfundable, and why you think it should be funded. In addition we would like to answer the question – Why are you best placed to deliver this work- to give us an idea of your motivation and experience of the issue, maximum 2000 words.

In addition please attach up to two documents, no more than 3000 words in total, that will help the jury understand the proposal that you are submitting to us.

Application to Unfundable UK
Expression of interest – Julia Farrington, producer

November, 2020

Dear Unfundable UK,

Re: The Festival of Disturbances – an artist-led review of Prevent strategy
I am writing this letter as an expression of interest in response to your call for proposals. I want to present ‘Festival of Disturbances’ an artist-led review of the government’s Prevent strategy.  The government’s handling of the review process so far is lamentable and they are wasting valuable time, please see text 1 for more detail on this. The Festival therefore invites artists working in all media to disturb the foundations of Prevent Strategy, to interrogate its assumptions, explore its impact and implications and imagine something new in its place.

I have taken it on myself to write an alternative Terms & Conditions (attached as one of two supporting documents). In this document I have altered the text of Lord Carlile’s original T&Cs, published in December 2019, reframing the original research questions aiming to reflect the concerns arising from civil society, and amending the methodology to create a transparent and accountable research and consultation process. This document will inform the selection and curation of work for the Festival.

‘The Festival of Disturbances’ will take place over a week, featuring a programme of performances, with installations and exhibitions alongside. The festival will be curated to take place virtually online, and in actuality in a series of temporary structures, marquees, domes, tents, enabling the public to experience the work of over 50 artists over the duration of the festival, with carefully coordinated Q&A sessions, debates and discussions, respecting current Covid 19 restrictions.  The festival will commission 3 new works via an open call to artists inviting proposals made in response to the questions posed in the altered Terms & Conditions. In addition, we will send out a call to programme existing work that addresses the questions and concerns of the alternative Terms & Conditions. Examples of this work appear as evidence in the second supporting document, ‘Index on Censorship’s submission to the original ‘Independent’ review, December 2019’. We know that the work cited in the report represents the tip of the iceberg, and there is much more out there that we want to connect with.

We want the festival to build public awareness of Prevent and provide a counter narrative, based on evidence which will be made available to the public, to the government’s assurances that Prevent and its associated surveillance machinery is necessary, effective and successful and to offer up imagined alternatives. The festival will offer experiential encounters with the consequences of Prevent and invite audience participation and feedback throughout. In addition we want to reach out to communities most directly affected by Prevent – those working in and using the services of education, health and social care, people from Muslim and South Asian background, those working in councils and local politics and the increasing number of people whose lives have been impacted by Prevent as activists, campaigners and, as we have heard most recently in an open letter to the Home Secretary, victims of domestic abuse. MPs from both houses will be invited to attend and experts in the field will be invited on to panel discussions. We want the Festival to act as a wake-up call to the public and the government, to alter the course of a policy which threatens to tear up the fabric of civil society and annihilate civil rights.

Your call asks why this project is unfundable. This project would require the input of a wide range of culture professionals and my experience tells me that many arts producers and programmers would like to give a platform to this kind of expression, but are fearful of how best to go about it – not least, persuading risk averse boards that it is a good idea. The whole festival could be considered a security risk; the police are jumpy around artwork that deals with radicalisation or terrorism as subject matter and would rather preemptively remove it, than have to manage the complexities of balancing their duty to uphold the right to freedom of expression with other policing duties. But most significantly, by the logic of Prevent, the chances are that anyone involved in this Festival risks being branded an extremist and find themselves on the Prevent Database. And we know from the Liberty Freedom of Information Request, that’s bad news.

So why do I believe Unfundable should fund this programme. For the reasons stated above.  The risks involved should be acknowledged and worked with, rather than used to quash the idea.  They are what makes the festival so important, they fuel the motivation to produce the festival – to reclaim the space to discuss these issues.  You will see from the report that I submitted to the review, how Prevent is chilling artistic freedom of expression, discussion and debate. I’ve worked with artists who have been censored by authoritarian regimes around the world for the past 10 years and produced numerous events internationally and in the UK to amplify voices of silenced artists. I’ve read 1984, twice. It’s not hard to see what is happening here; we can’t take our liberties for granted any more. And though the government would like us to, we can’t blame the horrendous acts of violence committed in recent years for this.  It is how successive governments chose to respond to these acts that we have to question, to review, to challenge. There are other ways – look at Norway in the wake of Breivik. We have to keep returning to the tension between freedom and security and make sure we deserve both- as Benjamin Franklin said, “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

When speaking truth to power is an indication of an extremist agenda, and producing contentious political artwork has been relegated to the realm of dreams, then we need a Festival of Disturbances. I am genuinely excited to see what artists would come up with in response to an open call. You’ll get an idea of the sort of work from the report appended below, though it only scratches the surface of what is out there and what can be created. I want to go beyond reports. The general public doesn’t read them and this strategy has implications for society as a whole and cannot be allowed to languish behind the veil of  bureaucracy.

That’s another reason why the arts are necessary. When artwork takes the law and its impact on people as subject matter, the relationship between the citizen and the state is brought into stark relief. It becomes something you can walk around, hear, see, ingest, interact with, the work transforms how information and ideas are shared, and crucially who with. That’s the point, art is a powerful medium, and changes how we see things, and that’s why it’s high risk and why I believe The Festival of Disturbances will inspire your support.

Yours sincerely

Julia Farrington

Attachment One: Why I am best placed to deliver this project
Attachment Two: Lord Carlile’s Terms and Conditions – altered
Attachment Three:  Index on Censorship’s submission to the ‘Independent’ Review

“For me the sorry state of civil liberties in general and counter-terrorism legislation in particular, acts as an absolute incentive to adopt the unique role of the artist as an informal, independent and privileged agent of social change and moderation of state power.”

Xenofon Kavvadias, artist, 2013

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