The Covid-19 pandemic radically changed perceptions of illness, health, science, and ethics, while reconfiguring relationalities between doctors and patients, institutions and subjects, among neighbors and communities, and in politics and governance. In a 3-day conference titled The Biopolitics of Global Health After Covid-19, we combine biopolitical and anthropological inquiry to allow locations to speak to concepts and spark a cross-disciplinary dialogue about (post-) pandemic discourses and practices of global health.

The conference is part of an NFG-funded, international project that brings together sociologists, philosophers, and anthropologists from different parts of the world for a series of collaborative workshops, forging a new kind of intellectual and ethnographic work to analyze biopolitical locations. Each of these workshops forms a laboratory for thought, reflection, and response to a globally uncertain post-pandemic world. The workshops connect philosophical concepts and empirical groundwork and foster disciplinary collaboration across the geographical localities of the project. Our starting point is that biopolitical thought - although crucial in understanding the dynamics of the Covid-19 pandemic - remains overly walled off from practice. It is time, we propose, to blur the disciplinary boundaries and renew the relationship between philosopher and ethnographer and in so doing challenge and renew a perspective on global health in a post-pandemic world based more on inclusion than exclusion.

This Cornell-based conference will explore a heterogeneity of pandemic responses, lived experiences, and afterlives. We are curious about the way novel invocations of ‘the social’ became the object of power during the Covid-19 pandemic - in lockdowns, through social distancing, and varying forms of collective attempts at healthcare. Through this focus, the conference invites scholars to reflect on localized knowledge and practices of the social as a basis for sustained critiques of global health institutions.

Keynote Speakers

Monday May 5, 4:30-6 PM: Klarman Auditorium KG70

Judith Cutchin, DNP, RN
First Vice President of the New York State Nurses Association
Vice President of National Nurses United

“COVID-19: A Look Back at the First Five Years from the Frontlines”

New York City was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, and nurses were on the frontlines. In the first months of the pandemic, nurses at the city’s public hospitals were hit particularly hard. They experienced a surge of patients and witnessed casualties on a scale they had never seen before. While struggling to learn how to treat this new, deadly infectious disease and to advocate for workplace protections for frontline healthcare workers, they managed to save hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers.

We recently commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. The scientific community has learned more about the virus and developed vaccines and better treatments; and COVID-19 is now endemic, driving seasonal patient surges in our hospitals. We will examine the major lessons learned on the frontlines from a workers’ rights and public health perspective; from proper infection control, to just workers compensation and sick leave policies, to hospital preparedness, to long-term health impacts, to public health infrastructure.

We will discuss what nurses, frontline healthcare workers, patients and the community at large still need to defend against COVID-19 and any other emerging public health threat in the current political environment.

Dr. Judith Cutchin has been a nurse for over 30 years and is currently working as Head Nurse in the Specialty Practice at NYC Health+Hospitals / Woodhull Hospital where she is also the LBU president. She is committed to patient education and ensuring that all New Yorkers receive high-quality healthcare, regardless of ability to pay or immigration status. She is NYSNA's first vice president and has served on the NYSNA board since 2018. Dr Cutchin is the chair of NYSNA’s Committee on Social Justice and Civil Rights and also a vice president of NNU. 

Wednesday May 7: 4:30 – 6 PM: Klarman Auditorium KG70

Elizabeth Povinelli
Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies
Columbia University

“Can There be a Concept of Health Beyond Bios?”

In this keynote, Povinelli explores some critical and legal discourses and tactics that coordinate human, more-than-human, and more-than-natural relations to health and well-being in the context of geontopower. Povinelli asks what might be the difference between a critical stance that seeks to develop a theory after geontopower and one that seeks to position itself against geontopower and asks what is the difference between a practice of extracting concepts, propositions and affects from from western sciences and/or Indigenous worlds and a practice that subtract from the former in order to make space for agencies in the latter.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist and gender studies scholar, currently serving as the Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. Her work focuses on developing a critical theory of late liberalism, particularly examining governance and sociality within settler colonial contexts. Povinelli is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous media group based in Australia's Northern Territory, which uses filmmaking as a form of social analysis and cultural survival. She has authored several influential books, including The Cunning of Recognition (2002), The Empire of Love (2006), Economies of Abandonment (2011), Geontologies (2016), and The Inheritance (2021). Her work has been recognized with awards including the 2017 Lionel Trilling Book Award for Geontologies. Her ethnographic analysis is animated by a critical engagement with the traditions of American pragmatism and continental immanent theory.

Roundtable Discussion

MAY 7, 10 AM - 12 PM: ILR Conference Center 423

With Alex Nading, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Alexander J. Travis and Raina Plowright.

“Perspectives on One Health”

This roundtable convenes four scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore the One Health paradigm. One Health emphasizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and ecosystem health. Through an interdisciplinary dialogue, panelists will discuss how their respective fields shape their understandings of One Health, examining the complexities of virus emergence, pathogen transmission, and health governance.

Participants include Professor Raina Plowright (Public & Ecosystem Health), Professor Alex Nading (Anthropology), Professor Juno Salazar Parreñas (Science and Technology Studies), and Alexander J. Travis (Public & Ecosystem Health). The conversation will engage with the challenges of implementing One Health across local, regional, and global scales, considering how equitable decision-making can be ensured within large-scale policymaking. Panelists will also reflect on the role of social science perspectives in advancing One Health approaches, particularly in the context of pandemic preparedness and response.

Following opening statements, there will be ample time for audience questions and comments. This roundtable will be an unique opportunity for a dynamic, transdisciplinary exchange of ideas on the future of global and planetary health governance and the One Health framework.

Presentations

On May 5 and May 6 2025, philosophers and anthropologists from around the globe will present papers related to the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath with the intention of moving between granular details and overarching context, situating configurations of health, illness, and governance during and after COVID-19.

MAY 5, 9:30-11:30 AM: 701 Clark Hall

Soumyabrata Choudhury

Carlo Caduff

Federico Scarpelli

MAY 5, 1:30 - 3 PM: 701 Clark Hall

Marco Piasentier

Alex Nading

Frédéric Keck

MAY 6, 9:30- 11:30 AM: 401 Physical Sciences Building

Timothy Campbell

Yasmeen Arif

Esca van Blarikom

Massimo Villani

MAY 6, 1:30 - 3 PM: 401 Physical Sciences Building

Davide Tarizzo

Ann Kelly

Thomas Cousins

Host
Department of Romance Studies

Cosponsors
The College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Anthropology