Publication date: 28 April 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800088078
Number of illustrations: 18
Covid’s Chronicities
From urgency to stasis in a pandemic era
Lenore Manderson (Editor), Nancy J. Burke (Editor)
Series: Culture and Health
COVID-19 continues to cause severe morbidity and ongoing mortality. Covid’s Chronicities documents the shifts that have occurred in the face of the pandemic, the state and community responses to it, its continuing toll on health services, economies and communities, and its compounding effects on people’s health, lives and livelihoods.
This volume draws on research from across Europe, North and Latin America, Asia and Africa, providing surprising contrasts and consistencies of experience. As the pandemic has shifted from urgency to chronic unpredictability, everywhere people have struggled to make sense of state actions in infection control, testing strategies and the roll out of vaccines, and to remake social life. The contributing authors illustrate with poignancy how chronic social problems and pandemic effects have worked bidirectionally, compounding multiple inequalities and exacerbating, for some, despair and disassociation. They also demonstrate the ingenuity of communities – of Indigenous ways of knowing and providing care in some settings, and elsewhere, the power of robust local community networks and informal innovations. While this book exposes the pandemic’s exploitation of deep structures of state and societal neglect, and describes the resultant morass, it also illustrates the determination and imaginations of caring communities to withstand Covid’s harms.
List of figures
List of tables
List of acronyms and abbreviations
List of contributors
1 Introduction: care, chronic neglect and intentional forgetting
Nancy J. Burke and Lenore Manderson
2 Fraying and patched homes: home and homeliness during the pandemic
Tuva B. Broch and Ida Hensler
3 Time and chronicity at the frontline of the pandemic in Japan
Junko Teruyama, Sachiko Horiguchi, Shuhei Kimura and the Covid Primary Care Collaboration
4 How time paused … COVID-19 and everyday life in Viet Nam Jennifer Ilo Van Nuil and Ha Nguyen Thanh
5 Children of Covid
Lisa J.Hardy
6 Overdose, COVID-19, and the unending churn of intervention in Vancouver, Canada
Danya Fast
7 The numbers game: Laila, Covid and the Egyptian constitution
Nefissa Naguib
8 Hunger’s chronicities: Covid and nutrition in a Mam-Maya Community in Guatemala
Emily Yates-Doerr, Rosario García Meza, and María García Maldonado
9 Chronicities of care: Mesoamerican immigrant and Indigenous farmworker families during COVID-19
The Covid-19 Farmworker Study Collective with Tomás A. Madrigal, Jennifer Martinez-Medina and Dvera I. Saxton
10 Chronic vulnerability, COVID-19 and the long fight of Indigenous Amazonian communities
Indira Vargas, Andrés Tapia and Carolyn Smith-Morris
11 Echoes of the past: epidemics and resilience among Indigenous peoples of the Upper Rio Negro, Brazil
Carolina Batista, Danilo Paiva Ramos and Rafaela Achatz
12 Covid, postpartum mental health and the decolonization of Indigenous family services
Heather Howard-Bobiwash, Danielle Gartner and Madeline Nash
13 Structured neglect and moral action: Punjabi and Hmong community-based organizations’ pandemic response in California’s San Joaquin Valley
Nancy J. Burke, Premjot K. Saroya and Chia Thao
14 Vaccine trials and the politics of extraction
Lenore Manderson and Susan Levine
15 ‘We’re the health care in the town, pretty much’: rural community pharmacy and the chronicity of systemic precarity
Laura L. Heinemann and Ellen B. Rubinstein
16 ‘But we want cassava not COVID-19 vaccines’: the politics of vaccination in Uganda
Grace Akello
17 The chronicity of militarism: Sri Lanka’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
Priyanka Jayakodi
18 Beyond COVID-19: Caring by words in Long COVID discourses in Japan and Sweden
Claudia Merli
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800088078
Number of illustrations: 18
Publication date: 28 April 2025
PDF ISBN: 9781800088078
EPUB ISBN: 9781800088115
Hardback ISBN: 9781800088085
Paperback ISBN: 9781800088092
Lenore Manderson (Editor) 
Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Nancy J. Burke (Editor)
Nancy J. Burke is Professor of Public Health and Anthropology and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in International Justice and Human Rights at the University of California, Merced.
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