Description
This paper studies the racial and colonial governance of public health through a focus on the border. While border closures were a common feature in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in many places across the world, racialized ideas of hygiene, cleanliness, and disease have long been written into immigration law. From the leper colony to the colonial clinic and the quarantine station, eugenic and therapeutic logics continue to be central to border control. Where recent abolitionist organizers have emphasized the need to “Fund care, not cops”, the paper thus asks: What has been the role of public health in (b)ordering bourgeois whiteness and those deemed fit, hardworking, and morally deserving? If medical and carceral systems share a common history, then how does care need to be reimagined, after public health?
