Interview: Practicing Critical Care Through COVID-19 and Beyond – Epistemic Unruliness 27

Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

In this episode focusing on the hazards of COVID-19, James interviews Dr. Sarmistha Talukdar, a queer, immigrant, neurodivergent audio-visual artist and a postdoctoral geneticist, and Jess Cowing, a PhD candidate working at the intersections of critical disability studies and settler colonialism. Jointly, Talukdar and Cowing are the organizers of the online workshop, “Chronic Illness and Mutual Care in Emergent Times: Preparing for COVID-19 and other Contagious Diseases,” which detailed the late public health crisis within an intersectional healing and disability justice frame that centers the experiences of those communities already held vulnerable and made unwell by the scarcity logic of capitalism and its asymmetrical distribution of resources and knowledge through the medical-industrial complex. How do we practice “social distancing” while mobilizing critical mutual care for our communities? And in an Anthropocene Age which has featured viral apocalypse since at least 1492, can we look through the prism of global pandemic towards the horizon of alternative futures and re-arrangements of our social relations, so that we might dream, imagine, and fantasize together about the world to come after capitalism?

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

https://alwaysalreadypodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/covid-decolonize.mp3

Links:

• COVID-19 Resources and Information Sheet (compiled by Cowing and Talukdar).
• Disability Justice Resources, Project LETS.
• Medical Industrial Complex Infographic, Leaving Evidence Blog.
• “COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Preparation for People Living with Chronic Illnesses in the United States,” Healing Justice Podcast.
• Marie Solis and Naomi Klein, “Coronavirus Is the Perfect Disaster for ‘Disaster Capitalism,’” VICE News.
• Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, Jan. 19, 2016.
• Prentis Hemphill, “Contagion, Consent, and Connection,” (former Healing Justice Director for Black Lives Matter Global Network).
• Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018)