Taken from Call for papers by UU 9th March 

lockdowns, health pass mandates, and blanket vaccine rollouts clearly attempt to posit some kind of 'public good' or 'solidarity' over more individualist considerations; sentiments which on the surface appear to be benevolent and even left-oriented.

though lockdowns have already  led to unevenly distributed psycho-social damage, and has exacerbated various economic fault-lines between marginalized and privileged groups locally and world-wide, vocal criticisms have so far largely emerged from economistic and right-oriented perspectives that merely espouse a superficial or neoliberal vocabulary of individual freedoms.

public resistance against injustices, like mandatory vaccinations and health passports emanate largely
from right-wing groups by appealing to superficial liberal sentiments.  this entire crisis situation runs the risk of being politically appropriated for right-wing or economically conservative
ends,

 this expert meeting (seeks)   to address lockdown, vaccine mandates, and health-pass politics from a multitude of left-wing, critical, feminist and anti-racist perspectives

Paper proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- Lockdown as pre- or proto- totalitarian

- Lockdown and the inadequacy of left-wing versus right-wing terminology and politics

- Lockdowns, vaccine rollouts and digital health apps, and their relation to global neoliberal capitalism

- Lockdown, covid-19 dashboards and pandemic modelling, and scientific (post)modernity, hypermodernity or technocracy

- Feminist and anti-racist critiques of lockdown and health passes as exacerbating gendered and raced disenfranchisement and disadvantage

- Lockdown and health passes, and theories of biopower, health optimization, dataveillance and necropolitics

- Critical histories of medical policing, population management and disease containment

- Critiques of the roles of biometrics, predictive technologies, data visualizations and dashboards in lockdown and vaccine politics

- The pandemic as (scientific and media) simulation

- Government propaganda and censorship around lockdown and vaccination

- Lockdown and the changing landscape of higher education: problems and opportunities for pedagogy and research

- The acquiescence and complicities of universities and other national and supranational institutions

- The role of mass and social media in anti- or pro-lockdown or vaccine propaganda, political polarization and forms of media virality (eg. via covid-19 memes)

- Lockdown as privileged or elite strategy

- Mandatory vaccine rollouts as assaults to the feminist appeal to bodily autonomy

- Lockdown and health passes, and their impacts on communities of care

- Affective aspects of lockdown: fear (eg. thanatophobia), hope, despair, anger, depression, exhaustion, arrogance, dissociation, trauma reactions

- Lockdown and vaccine development science and politics as performances of masculinity

- Ethical considerations regarding mass experimentation, moral shaming and lateral citizen surveillance

- The symbolic politics of lockdown (eg. virtue signaling)

- Christian eschatological and apocalyptic narratives and lockdown

- Teleological and theological narratives of science as salvation (eg.
via vaccinations)

- Left-wing or more equitable alternatives to lockdown (eg. feminist
care ethics)

- Lockdown discourse and the family

- Lockdown discourse and 'the home' (eg. political assumptions about the
base unit of polity being biological families who live together in the home)

- The appropriation of health pass systems for perverse political ends

Responses: 

Quite surprising that there is no mention of the fact that vaccine development and all research should be a public good and that people all over the world are suffering due to lack of access to universal public health services. And about the fact that multinational corporations have a stranglehold on the health sector. My friends in countries like Mali had to mobilize in cooperatives to produce affordable masks and sanitizing products, 9 times cheaper than imported products. In Mali, 0 doses of the vaccine have been administered in the last 28 days. - Yvon Poirier

it is possibly the only topic where the established left has been raising a critical voice and which chimes with the stereotypical lefty do-good scenario that the blurb confronts.

But what if the vaccines in and of themselves are not a good idea? What if they rather constitute a classic capitalist technofix that can resurrect the dying patriarchal science and liberal democracy / white supremacy establishment? Keep the system going by introducing yet another layer of symptom chasing, highly profitable at that, while leaving root causes intact?

Is vaccine solidarity a capitalist, colonial market expansion that undermines other forms of health approaches and knowledge systems, or it it a common good?

Whichever way one chooses to look at it, it seems, it is at least both. - mp