The “Corona Warriors”? Community health workers in the governance of India's COVID-19 response

India's nearly 1-million strong band of quasi-volunteer accredited social health activists (ASHAs) have been key actors in government efforts to control COVID-19. Utilizing a nationalist rhetoric of war, ASHAs were swiftly mobilized by the government in March 2020 as ‘COVID warriors’ engaged in tracking illness, disseminating information, and caring for quarantined individuals. The speed at which ASHAs were mobilized into mentally and physically grueling labor was all the more stunning given these minimally paid community health workers have long been seen to have low morale given their precarious, informalized work arrangements. Building on work examining the spatialities of global health governance alongside literature on geographic contingency, this paper explores the ways that nationalist COVID-19 war rhetoric promulgated from Delhi worked as a technology of health governance to propel ASHAs into certain forms of action, yet also opened up spaces of potentiality for them to reimagine their relationship to both the state and the communities they serve. In particular, in our analysis of in-depth telephone interviews with ASHA workers in the state of Himachal Pradesh, we find that their hailing as COVID warriors inspired patriotic calls to duty and legitimized their (long over-looked) roles as critical governance actors, yet also was subject to resistance and reworking due to a combination of institutional histories, local politics, as well as happenstantial everyday encounters of ASHA work. The precarious employment of ASHAs – in terms of basic remuneration as well as the great on-the-job risks that they have faced – underscores both the fragile nature of India's health governance system as well as possible political movements for its renewal. We conclude by calling for geographers to give greater attention to community health care workers as a key window into understanding the uneven ways in which health systems are made manifest on the ground, and their ability to respond to citizens' healthcare needs – both in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.     

Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi

ABSTRACT

This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai?i, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which was in the process of adopting race. Largely unrecognized, they worked in concert with Native Hawaiians – as spouses, educators, attorneys, and advisors to the monarchs – to influence and resist the development of American racial ideologies. Combining Hawaiian language sources, missionary journals, and ship logs with the scant existing historiography, this article accounts for Black people in the Hawaiian Islands during its tumultuous shift from an independent nation to a US Territory – a period and people neglected in twentieth-century scholarship on the Black Pacific.     

生存、适应与融合：牙买加华人社区的形成与发展（1854—1962）

本文对牙买加华人社会的生存和发展进行了历史的概览。作者对有关牙买加华人的外文研究状况进行了评述 ,试图利用至今尚无人利用的牙买加发行的华文报纸对当地华人的历史进行梳理 ,描述了 1 0 0多年来牙买加华人社区的的起源、适应、融合与身份认同变化的过程 ,特别对华人的组织、华人的经济社会活动及其参政态度的变化进行了分析。作者认为 ,华人在牙买加经历了从农业工人到商人的转变 ,他们依靠自己的组织———中华会馆在逆境中谋生存、求发展。一些社团领袖以特有的敏感积极投身于当地的政治活动。华人与当地社会的融合过程在牙买加独立时期已经接近完成。     

“We can’t return to normal”: committing to tourism equity in the post-pandemic age

Abstract

Tourism transformation must bring an actionable focus on equity. A new normal openly recognizes the crises and tensions inhabiting tourism well before the COVID-19 pandemic along with the holistic and integrated nature of a pro-equity agenda. A resilient post-pandemic tourism must be more equitable and just, in terms of how it operates, its effects on people and place, and how we as scholars teach, study and publicly engage the travel industry—particularly in preparing its current and future leaders. A commitment to equity is about making specific changes in practices and decisions at multiple levels, along with growing a wider ethical framework. This pivot of a mindset requires us, as tourists, corporations, and educators to step away from a selfish perspective and critically change our perception and understanding of tourism to a truly equitable focus. Consequently, these actions force us to question the consumerism and capitalistic lens that has contributed to mass growth across the touristic landscape and instead, choose a system that fosters sustainable and equitable growth - which in turn, ‘slows down’ our ways of consuming the world around us - transforming our values and experiences of what tourism is and should be.     

新冠肺炎疫情和公众焦虑情绪的时空分异研究——基于微博数据的分析

采集河南省17个地市在COVID-19疫情期间的微博数据,利用微博数据分析疫情期间公众焦虑情绪及其时空分异.研究结果发现:公众的焦虑情绪波动幅度与疫情态势基本成正相关,疫情初期,公众对疫情数据的变化敏感,新增确诊人数的小幅增加和下降均能引起公众焦虑情绪的大幅攀升和下跌,疫情态势稳定向好时,焦虑情绪波动幅度逐渐趋稳;在疫...     

“Hold This for Me”: Counter Memory and Trauma in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

ABSTRACT

African Caribbean Canadian author Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon augments many African diasporic narratives’ efforts to counter and rewrite exclusive histories. While Brand’s novel challenges and nuances dominant historical narratives by offering counter memory of African diasporic experiences, particularly experiences of enslavement, it also simultaneously illuminates the conflicts that emerge when “holding” and passing on memories that are traumatic. Therefore, Brand’s text emphasizes both the importance of employing counter memory to revise hegemonic historical narratives and the necessity of assessing the impact of trauma on individual and collective remembrances.