COVID CHARTER, A BETTER WORLD

Research Forum and Book Launch
Presented by UEA Health & Humanities Network and UEA Latin American Studies Network

Date	May 18th, 2021
Time	5pm (UK Time) 11am (Mexico/Colombia) 12pm (New York) - 9am (Los Angeles)
Location	Microsoft Teams Please register in advance with Richard.Delahaye@uea.ac.uk or via website https://store.uea.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/faculty-of-arts-and-humanities/conferencesevents/a-covid-charter-a-better-world-with-professor-toby-miller to receive details for participation and a discount code to purchase the book.

The pandemic is a limit case, an emergency of cosmic proportions that alerts us to the failings of the day, specifically in the elemental field of health. It throws into sharp relief the fault lines of inequality that divide the world both between and within sovereign-states, compelling near-universal fear and suffering and raising a vital question: how should we reconstruct our societies, environments, cultures, and economies in the anticipated wake of the pandemic—a world 'after' it? To find an answer, we need to examine the dominant discourse of public policy, and healthcare in particular, then lay out a comprehensive alternative.

We need a Covid Charter.

Hence my new book with that title in search of such a thing (Rutgers University Press, 2021). I look at the opportunities as well as the terrors that present themselves, examining corporate, scientific, activist, and governmental actions and perspectives and their impact, notably on disadvantaged, vulnerable communities.

The cases come from two wealthy countries, the US and Britain, that were supposedly well-prepared for such a pandemic but were devastated by it, and two poorer nations, Mexico and Colombia, from the region of the world that has been most affected. I have lived in these four places over the past three decades, serially experiencing excellent private healthcare, thanks to my employment; good public healthcare, courtesy of my citizenship; and no work insurance or access to socialized medicine, as a consequence of being a foreigner. My agenda and mode of analysis derive from epidemiology, public health, political economy, sociology, literature, area studies, political theory, science, anthropology, environmental studies, philosophy, and history. I commingle these disciplines under the sign of a materialist analysis committed to progressive change.

Speaker

Professor Toby Miller

Toby Miller is Stuart Hall Professor of Cultural Studies, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Cuajimalpa and Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Collaborator, Murdoch University. He was a Professor at the University of California Riverside for a decade and New York University for eleven years.

The author and editor of over fifty books, his work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, Italian, Farsi, French, Urdu, and Swedish.

His most recent volumes are A COVID Charter, a Better World (2021), Violence (2021), The Persistence of Violence: Colombian Popular Culture (2020), How Green is Your Smartphone? (co-authored, 2020), El trabajo cultural (2018), Greenwashing Culture (2018), Greenwashing Sport (2018), and The Routledge Companion to Global Cultural Policy (co-edited, 2018). Formerly the editor of the Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Social Text, and Television & New Media, he currently edits Open Cultural Studies and is co-editor of Social Identities: Journal of Race, Nation and Culture.