Anthropological Contributions to the Covid-19 Crisis
A VIRTUAL SEMINAR SERIES BY THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSITUTE
Thursday 2 July 2020 at 3pm (BST)
A video of the event is available here
Smartphones and the fine line between care and surveillance
Prof Daniel Miller, University College London
Two recent developments have made the fine line between care and surveillance central not only to anthropology but to politics and popular morality: the rise of smartphones and the response to Covid-19. Smartphone based apps are being considered globally for documenting every social interaction of an individual, to find and test those contacts and thereby suppress Covid-19. Books such as Surveillance Capitalism, however, have made us alert to how smartphones take personal surveillance by companies and states to a whole new level. The balance between care and surveillance is ultimately a moral and political decision. I will argue based on finding from our ASSA project that populations are surprisingly well qualified to take such decisions.
Covid-19: Visual Expressions of Social Demands of Coronavirus in Nigeria
Dr Kehinde Adepegba, Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu
COVID-19 also known as coronavirus is a scourge that has ravaged the entire world. Thousands of people, world over, have contracted the disease leaving many dead. Since the coronavirus does not have a cure nor a vaccine, keeping social distance, regular washing of hands with soap or/and alcoholic-based sanitizer have been overtly recommended to curb its spread. Lockdown has been employed to effect stay-at-home and compulsory use of face mask during ease of lockdown. In Nigeria, the social change as result of the demands posed by the pandemic was visually expressed in many ways by artists and people. Therefore, the paper aims at examining the creative expressions of Nigerians in textual and visual forms. This will be limited to selected Facebook posts by my friends on the subject matter. This will be analysed using formal and contextual analysis. Freud’s psychoanalysis theory of art will be used to interrogate the subject to underscore how the expressions provide considerable relief from COVID-19 tension by the discharge of energy through socially acceptable channel like Facebook, and how they offer opportunities for sublimation of impulses of various kinds.
This will be held on Zoom. To register please go to https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_m8sWpUGVSTy-yryHDXYyIQ
