Patricia J Lopez

2020 in the United States has been marked by two converging crises-the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale uprisings in support of black lives. These crises have been met with both a counterproductive and inadequate response from the federal government. We examine these converging crises at the individual, social, and political scales. The biological realities of COVID-19 impact different populations in widely varied ways-the poor, the elderly, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and those living with comorbidities get sick and die at the highest rates. Social distancing guidelines shifted millions of people to work-from-home and millions more lost their jobs, even as care laborers, preponderantly women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, were asked to put their and their loved one's lives on the line for the continuation of all of our lives. These biological, social, and economic crises have been punctuated by civil unrest, as millions took to the streets for racial justice, noting the unequal impacts of the pandemic. These converging crises have laid bare decades of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and ideologies, undergirded as they have been by racial capitalism, for their fundamental uncaringness. In this paper, we argue that this pandemic not only made a wider population more acutely aware of the necessity and importance of the need to care and for caring labors, but also that we stand at the precipice of potentiality of producing a more caring society. To frame our argument, we draw on Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's (1987) framework of three bodies-individual, social, and political-to unpack the multi-scalar entanglements in the differential impacts of COVID-19, questions of care, and their articulation in the current political-economic context.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted work and home life in unfathomable ways that have shaped and will continue to shape academia and the discipline of geography more specifically. As has been well documented, the pandemic had an outsized impact on the lives and labors of women, particularly women with small children; Black, Indigenous, and people of color; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer teaching faculty; precariously unemployed people; and other marginalized groups. In this article we draw on interviews with academic teaching staff from across the United States to examine the uneven impacts of the pandemic, with a focus on work as well as home life and the implications of those impacts for current and future configurations of the discipline. We conclude with recommendations for how to ameliorate the impacts of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature-political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on car-to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.

For scholars across a wide range of disciplines, the work of building critical inquiry and guiding students to discover and hone the tools necessary to be attentive to the world is not new. Critical scholars have long understood that to engage in a pedagogy of emancipation and transformation is "to work for justice, changing [the] educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support [systems of domination] or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage in rigorous study and to think critically" (hooks, 2003, p. xiii). Just as much as we have taken on this responsibility of opening our students to deeper awareness of various modes of violence, dispossession, war, displacement, and oppression that permeate our world, it also is imperative to work to imagine worlds otherwise-to raise the specter of hope and to not give in to despondency or cynicism. Indeed, for many scholars such as bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Henry Giroux, and as I further argue here, hope is a central imperative for an emancipatory education. At the same time, I further suggest that as educators, we must be careful to not oversimplify hope as either an ephemeral romantic notion or as a rigid radicalism. Rather, hope must be fluid and transformative even as it is able to be transformed-taking on new shapes in the face of a changing world. In this article, I center a pedagogy of hope in the need for an anti-racist and decolonial geography education. I further argue that a pedagogy of hope requires imagination and a recognition that we simply may not yet have the imaginative capacity to know what worlds-otherwise may be possible. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility for paving the way for future possibilities.

This multi-authored contribution explores what the COVID-19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more-than-human. We show how COVID-19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non-human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrificed. Such difference encompasses practices of racialisation and racism, healthcare austerity, the circulation of capital, bordermaking, intervention into non-human nature, wildlife trade bans, anthropocentrism, and the exploitation of animal test subjects. The contributions highlight how COVID-19 provides a needed opportunity to unite new materialist and anti-racist, anti-colonial scholarship as well as reimagine more radically sustainable multispecies futures. This requires embracing anti-colonial humility, confronting debts owed to lab animal

This article makes a case for a “buddy system” approach to research and scholarship, or a kind of “caring with” our colleagues, as feminist praxis and as an intentional, politicized response to the neoliberalization of the academy. Through autoethnographic writing on our travels together into farmed animal auction yards, we explain the buddy system as a mode of caring, solidarity, and love that differs from collaborative research, focused as it is on caring for and about our colleagues and their research even (or especially) when we have no direct stakes in the research being conducted. We contribute to three feminist conversations with this approach: feminist care ethics in geography; emotional geographies; and critical perspectives on the neoliberalization of the academy. We advocate the buddy system as an extension of feminist care ethics, enriching how feminists think about “doing” research. We draw on feminist geographies of emotion and our own emotions (grief especially) experienced while witnessing processes of nonhuman animal commodification to politicize the act of researching and to develop a more caring way of inhabiting the academy. This is particularly important, we argue, in the context of deepening neoliberal logics that turn the academy into a place where care and love become radical acts of resistance and transformation.

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women’s participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the U.S.’s involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the U.S.’s involvement in WWI on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women’s – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women’s movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and war fronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.

The US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 marks the turn from military ‘modernizing missions’ to militarized humanitarianism in US interventionism. Political unrest in Haiti coupled with growing public concern in the US and Haiti over the occupation in the first five years forced an escalating series of official investigations. Together with the growing recognition of voices of dissent, these investigations exposed the brutal violence and failure of the humanitarian mission in Haiti. Tasked with meeting the mandates of the Haitian–American Convention and struggling to meet the promised aid, the US Navy, with the help of the State Department, enlisted the Rockefeller Foundation to manage and mediate the militarized humanitarian endeavors in Haiti. In this paper I explore the failed attempts at humanitarianism in the area of health and the events leading up to and informing the investigations. I argue that the turn to nongovernmental organizations in the 1920s, while not wholly unfounded, ushered in a new era of US humanitarianism that attempted to soften the appearance of the ‘modernizing mission’.

Following the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, several emergency measures were implemented with regard to mobility and migration. Children already in the adoptive process were granted humanitarian parole, speeding up the adoptions, deportations were halted, Temporary Protected Status was opened for Haitians already living in the US, and the US Coast Guard patrol was stepped up in anticipation of Haitians fleeing the devastation. In the first few months after the earthquake, 1150 children were flown to the US. Twelve months later, in the midst of the deadly cholera outbreak, deportations resumed. In all of these forms of migration management, there were multiple processes at play – compassion (or care), securitization, legal mandates, and human rights. At root, however, is a distinct and clearly marshaled prerogative of the U.S. government to decide which Haitians’ lives would be allowed to be mobile, which would be forced to immobilize, and ultimately, whose lives would be saved. While contradictory migration relations between the two countries are not new, what was new was the intensity and immediacy – the absolute certainty with which each of these decisions impacted the lives – the living bodies – of mobile (and immobile) Haitians. This paper explores the uneven – sometimes lifesaving and sometimes deadly, but always precarious – movement of bodies between earthquake-torn Haiti and the United States, and asks, which ‘lives at stake’ are worth saving?

From the early 20th century fumbling humanitarian interventions there emerged the seeds of what Eyal Weizman calls the “humanitarian present,” or “the collusion of … technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law with military and political powers” (2011, 4). The occupation of Haiti by U.S. forces from 1915-1934 marked a particularly salient turn from military “modernizing missions” to philanthropic health and development projects that reframed the calculative technologies of humanitarian interventions toward a language that masked the range of violences employed. In this paper, I examine both the discursive turn, as it unfolded through courts-martial, Congressional investigations, and military reports, as well as the material turn to the private sector to manage and mediate military occupation and subsequent humanitarian endeavors in Haiti. The first five years of the occupation were marred with “indiscriminate killing” and torture of native Haitians that were excused as a necessary evil calculated to militate against “a far greater sum total of misery” (Lansing, 1921). But public outcry in the U.S. against the mass violence coupled with JAG and Congressional inquiries led to a concerted effort to build goodwill with Haitians. In the aftermath of the inquiries, the U.S. military attempted to implement sanitary and public health programs, eventually turning to the private sector, the Rockefeller Foundation, to aid in the restructuring. Yet, a number of experts employed by the Rockefeller Foundation in Haiti (and elsewhere), were in fact military personnel who had either retired directly into positions at the Foundation or who were excused from military service to fulfill contracts with the Foundation. I argue that this reliance on military personnel to build the newly-budding development industry laid the groundwork for this humanitarian present.

Mountz (2004) and others (Nagar et al, 2002; Hyndman, 2001) point to the importance in the scalar narratives of globalization, and particularly, in locating the processes of power in relation to the state. In this case, the processes of power are being negotiated and managed across multiple states and supra-state organizations. Haiti represents a new place of transnationalized citizenship formation in all of the ways that we imagine citizenship: as a technology of control (Kearns, 1995; Mitchell, 2005), the role of the city in the development of citizenship (Holston & Appadurai, 1996; Staeheli, 2008), global citizenship and post-citizenship cosmopolitanism (Desforges, 2004; Sassen, 2992; Ong, 2006), and in relation to migration and non-citizenship (Mitchell, 2004; Varsanyi, 2008). The impotence of the collective health citizenship of Haitians was made manifestly clear during the past 20 months through the massive international mobilization of humanitarian aid, military security, and development programs and people. Health citizenship is the economic, political and social negotiation related to the rights and responsibilities of individuals to and within the nation-state and of the nation-state to the individual with regard to healthful living. This is not limited merely to access to health care, but includes all that is incumbent in letting live well. Perhaps the most striking and startling display of this denationalization of health citizenship has been through the introduction of cholera into Haiti.
The appearance of cholera – a disease never before experienced in Haiti’s history – in October 2010 had major impacts far beyond just the health of Haitians. The effects of the cholera outbreak reverberated internationally as it magnified the Haitian people’s frustration with the on-going humanitarian occupation, in place since 2004. While Haitians quickly pointed to the Nepalese UN Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) camp just upstream from Mirebalais, the site of the outbreak, UN officials were quick to deny any fault, at all, without so much as a nod to the possibility, exacerbating already fragile relations with MINUSTAH. Further tests conducted by French and Haitian epidemiologists and the Centers for Disease Control in the US pointed to the importation of the disease by the Nepalese army. What emerged with the cholera outbreak was a game of blame-shifting which ultimately led to a potentially more rapid spread of the disease through the limitations of medicine and personnel movements by blockades built by protestors in the street and limited health care action through rising fears within humanitarian programs which set new and stricter curfews on care workers. Cholera also furthered popular delegitimization of the UN peace-keeping forces in Haiti. Geographies of blame have been mobilized within geopolitical frames, from colonial occupation and “tropical medicine,” to legitimization of cultural and racial marginalization in discourses of modern (re)emerging infectious disease. However, in Haiti, this geopolitical blame-game is no longer the singular ambit of a Western view, but is a decidedly two-way street that challenges typical race-space-disease discourses.

Geographies of blame have been mobilized within geopolitical frames, from colonial occupation and “tropical medicine,” to legitimization of cultural and racial marginalization in discourses of modern (re)emerging infectious disease. However, in Haiti, this geopolitical blame-game is no longer the singular ambit of a Western view, but is a decidedly two-way street that is challenging typical race-space-disease discourses. The appearance of cholera – a disease never before experienced in Haiti’s history – in October 2010 had major impacts far beyond just the health of Haitians. The effects of the cholera outbreak reverberated internationally as it magnified the Haitian people’s frustration with the on-going humanitarian occupation, in place since 2004. While Haitians quickly pointed to the Nepalese UN Mission for Stabilization in Haiti (MINUSTAH) camp just upstream from Mirebalais, the site of the outbreak, UN officials were quick to deny any fault, without so much as a nod to the possibility, exacerbating the already fragile relations Haitia's have with MINUSTAH. Further tests conducted by French doctors “proved inconclusive,” but not inconclusive enough for the Haitian public. What emerged with the cholera outbreak was a game of blame-shifting which ultimately led to a potentially more rapid spread of the disease through the limitations of medicinse and personnel movements by blockades built by protestors and through rising fears within humanitarian programs which set new and stricter curfews on care workers. In this paper, I explore the geopolitics of the disease etiology of the outbreak and the discursive reversal of the causal arrow.

The COVID-19 pandemic and state violence converged in the U.S. in 2020 highlighting the uneven distribution of illness and death. In this article, we mobilize three bodies of literature-political ecologies of health and the body, Black geographies and racial capitalism, and Black feminist work on care-to understand the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian people, and to imagine different, more just futures. We argue that these literatures center relationships, enabling an analysis that incorporates viruses and cellular processes, histories of racism, power differences, and political economy. We conclude by taking inspiration from the uprisings and Black feminism to envision a more caring future that nurtures relationships.

1. Introducing Economies of Death 2. The Currency of Grief: 9/11 deaths, Afghan lives, and intimate intervention 3. The Cost of a Second Chance: Life, Death, and Redemption among Prison Inmates and Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorses in Bluegrass Kentucky 4. The Administration of Death: Killing and Letting Die during the Cambodian Genocide 5. Is the Puerto Rican Parrot Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability 6. "Deep Inside Dogs Know What They Want": Animality, Affect, and Killability in Commercial Pet Foods 7. Archives of Death: Lynching Photography, Animalization, Biopolitics and the Lynching of William James 8. Remains to Be Seen: Photographing "Road Kill" and The Roadside Memorial Project 9. Love, Death, Food, and Other Ghost Stories: The Hauntings of Intimacy and Violence in Contemporary Peru 10. Economies of Death: An ethical framework and future directions

Scholars have long held that World War I markedly impacted women's participation in the public sphere as questions of appropriate wartime participation for women arose. Posters were an important tool for communicating notions of feminine citizenship and patriotism during the US involvement in the war. In this article, I explore the influence of the US involvement in World War I on social constructions of white femininity and citizenship through their portrayal in American Red Cross posters produced between 1914 and 1919. These posters offer a distinct visual documentation of the cultural shift in the portrayal of, and the insistence on, white women's – particularly nurses’ – responsibilities during wartime. I argue that the sentiments and language of the newly splintered women's movements were co-opted into the service of the war and were further emboldened with religious sentiments. American Red Cross posters called upon women to enact their presumed innate nurturing tendencies, and by extension, their feminine citizenship, at both the home and warfronts. In this way, the labor of the private sphere was drawn into the service of the war but without fully admitting women into the public sphere.

The US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 marks the turn from military ‘modernizing missions’ to militarized humanitarianism in US interventionism. Political unrest in Haiti coupled with growing public concern in the US and Haiti over the occupation in the first five years forced an escalating series of official investigations. Together with the growing recognition of voices of dissent, these investigations exposed the brutal violence and failure of the humanitarian mission in Haiti. Tasked with meeting the mandates of the Haitian–American Convention and struggling to meet the promised aid, the US Navy, with the help of the State Department, enlisted the Rockefeller Foundation to manage and mediate the militarized humanitarian endeavors in Haiti. In this paper I explore the failed attempts at humanitarianism in the area of health and the events leading up to and informing the investigations. I argue that the turn to nongovernmental organizations in the 1920s, while not wholly unf...

Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence—not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman's notion critiquing “lesser evil” solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and “moral technologies” that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in “need.” At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses—often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility, and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions o...

2020 in the United States was marked by two converging crises-the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale uprisings in support of Black lives. These crises were met with both a counterproductive and inadequate response from the federal government. We examine these converging crises at the individual, social, and political scales. The biological realities of COVID-19 impact different populations in widely varied ways-the poor, the elderly, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and those living with comorbidities get sick and die at the highest rates. Social distancing guidelines shifted millions of people to work-from-home and millions more lost their jobs, even as care laborers, preponderantly women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, were asked to put their and their loved ones' lives on the line for the continuation of all of our lives. These biological, social, and economic crises have been punctuated by civil unrest, as millions took to the streets for racial justice, noting the unequal impacts of the pandemic. These converging crises have laid bare decades of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and ideologies, undergirded as they have been by racial capitalism, for their fundamental uncaringness. In this paper, we argue that this pandemic not only made a wider population more acutely aware of the necessity and importance of the need to care and for caring labors, but also that we stand at the precipice of potentiality--of producing a more caring society. To frame our argument, we draw on Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's (1987) framework of three bodies-individual, social, and political-to unpack the multi-scalar entanglements in the differential impacts of COVID-19, questions of care, and their articulation in the current political-economic context.

1. Introducing Economies of Death 2. The Currency of Grief: 9/11 deaths, Afghan lives, and intimate intervention 3. The Cost of a Second Chance: Life, Death, and Redemption among Prison Inmates and Thoroughbred Ex-Racehorses in Bluegrass Kentucky 4. The Administration of Death: Killing and Letting Die during the Cambodian Genocide 5. Is the Puerto Rican Parrot Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability 6. "Deep Inside Dogs Know What They Want": Animality, Affect, and Killability in Commercial Pet Foods 7. Archives of Death: Lynching Photography, Animalization, Biopolitics and the Lynching of William James 8. Remains to Be Seen: Photographing "Road Kill" and The Roadside Memorial Project 9. Love, Death, Food, and Other Ghost Stories: The Hauntings of Intimacy and Violence in Contemporary Peru 10. Economies of Death: An ethical framework and future directions

Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence—not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman's notion critiquing “lesser evil” solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and “moral technologies” that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in “need.” At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses—often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility, and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.