The political autoimmunity of the COVID-19 response: how national borders and patents undermine a sustainable and equitable global health

* We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic response has been characterised by a Derridean ‘political autoimmunity’, undermining a sustainable and equitable protection of global health. * This self-harming immunisation politics has been driven by a coalesce of national borderism, which excludes people on the basis of national borders, and patentism, which privileges the treatment of wealthy countries and people who can afford the patented medicines and vaccines. * To globally counter these politically autoimmune strategies now and in the future, we argue to remind political leaders and patent holders of today of the classical physician’s Hippocratic oath, and to strive for a truly inclusive, pandemocratic health politics beyond national origin and income

‘Keeping on the move without letting pass’: Rethinking biopolitics through mobility"

“This is the sixth time that I am coming back to the border, in Ventimiglia, after being taken by force to the city of Taranto. I am now trying again to cross to France, I really hope that this time I make it, as I have no money and no energies left”. M., a Sudanese national who arrived in Italy in 2018 from Libya, is one of the many migrants who try to cross to France, along the coast, passing through the Italian city of Ventimiglia. Yet, most of those who try are pushed back to Italy by the French police, sometimes being held for hours in the police station at the border, without being allowed to claim asylum. On the Italian side of the border, some migrants are randomly caught by the police and put on one of the coaches and, on a weekly basis, transferred to Taranto, a city located 1200 kilometres southern of Ventimiglia. Migrants are taken to the Hotspot of Taranto and, after being identified, they are usually released few days later; the majority of them goes back to the Italian-French border, by train or by bus, despite they might be exhausted and running out money. Such a routinised police practice of internal forced transfers does not discourage migrants from going back to Ventimiglia and from trying again and again; nor are migrants taken to Taranto with the goal of detaining them for long time. And yet, they are kept on the move, forced to divert their routes and to repeat the same journey multiple times. The forced hyper-mobility of the migrants who try to cross to France from Ventimiglia is not an exceptional case study; rather, the focus on Ventimiglia sheds light on the dramatic migrants’ goose game , that is, on the convoluted geographies that they are forced to undertake due to legal restrictions, police measures, spatial blockages and ad-ministrative violence

Collective Discussion: Movement and Carceral Spatiality in the Pandemic

Various measures of mobility restrictions were introduced since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This collective discussion examines them in relation to six different carceral techniques that govern movement: citizenship, nativism, colonialism, infrastructure, gender, and borders. We investigate how these spatializing techniques of carcerality have been modified and strengthened in the pandemic and their implications for how we conceptualize migration. Our conversation revolves around the relationality between movement and confinement to argue that they are not in opposition but work in tandem: Their meanings become interchangeable, and their relationship is reconfigured. In this collective discussion, we are interested in how to analyze movement/migration in ways that do not define the pandemic through temporal boundaries to mark its beginning and ending

The political autoimmunity of the COVID-19 response: how national borders and patents undermine a sustainable and equitable global health

We argue that the COVID-19 pandemic response has been characterised by a Derridean ‘political autoimmunity’, undermining a sustainable and equitable protection of global health.This self-harming immunisation politics has been driven by a coalesce of national borderism, which excludes people on the basis of national borders, and patentism, which privileges the treatment of wealthy countries and people who can afford the patented medicines and vaccines.To globally counter these politically autoimmune strategies now and in the future, we argue to remind political leaders and patent holders of today of the classical physician’s Hippocratic oath, and to strive for a truly inclusive, pandemocratic health politics beyond national origin and income

The autoimmunity of the modern university: How its managerialism is self-harming what it claims to protect

What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organization, the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit. In this essay, we stand up against this worrying self-harming protection strategy, what we term—following Jacques Derrida—the autoimmunity of the university. To structure our argument, we will discern the main worrying autoimmune paradoxes of this university policy in the hope to further the debate and potentially remedy the university of this self-inflicted harm

Agape in Business:Policies and Actions beyond Caritas

Authors Harry Hummels, Yannick Bammens, Maike van Dijk, and Annelies van Uden argue in this chapter that agape means more than simply living up to the expectation of corporate social responsibility and creating shared value. It allows us to rethink the ways in which we do business, while aiming to achieve the mission and objectives of the business. Even though for many agape has roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is a meaningful concept and can be applied in a secular business world that aims to create (long-term) value for its stakeholders, including shareholders

Paralyzed by the Dashboard Light: Environmental Characteristics and Firm's Scanning Capabilities in East Africa

Contains fulltext : 201786.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)29 januari 201