Pandemic Space: Understanding Quarantine and Responsibilization in Times of Corona

当前的COVID-19危机有力地表明，大流行本质上是一种空间现象，需要重新安排人与病原体的相互作用。对当前大流行的应对措施侧重于隔离，其规模是历史上前所未有的，不仅针对特定群体（受感染或有风险的身体），而且针对整个人群。然而，隔离不仅仅是简单的强制不动。自我隔离、灵活限制、社会距离和合规监管等技术依赖于激活个人共同创造自己和他人的健康，或“负责任”的公民。虽然这一概念是最近公共卫生研究的核心，但我们缺乏对责任如何影响普通人在大流行时期如何理解和驾驭身体和公共空间的了解。我们的项目调查隔离策略和做法，作为对抗流行病的核心公共卫生工具，以及寻求使其有效的责任过程。通过阐明检疫和责任的关系，该项目将对疾病预防的历史和理论作出重大贡献。采用涉及历史学家，社会学家和人类学家的跨学科方法，从而汇集跨区域和比较的观点，我们将追求三个相互关联的分析轴：(1)全球公共卫生话语中检疫知识的流通，(2)美国西班牙流感期间的检疫史，以及(3)目前南非应对冠状病毒的检疫实践。虽然(1)采用跨区域视角重建疾病控制知识和规范日益共享的历史及其（后）殖民遗产，但(2)和(3)中的案例研究侧重于实地检疫的实施和谈判。无论是在美国还是南非，这些努力都受到种族的影响，种族在两个社会的公共卫生的社会和空间秩序中都起着重要作用。我们了解流行病空间及其通过隔离的构建，这是通过专家知识构思的，由普通公民制定的公共卫生机构监管，并在全球病毒传播的背景下跨越多个尺度。我们的主要研究问题是：大流行空间和隔离策略是如何在国际/全球卫生话语中概念化和编纂的？哪些社会群体被认为是负责任的公民，种族在这方面发挥了什么作用？关于个人空间和卫生的哪些科学观察和流行假设将公共卫生辩论引向负责任的行为？普通公民是如何接受这些观点的？

As the current COVID-19 crisis powerfully shows, pandemics are inherently spatial phenomena that necessitate a re-ordering in how people and pathogens interact. Responses to the current pandemic focus on quarantine, at scales historically unprecedented, targeting not only specific groups (of infected or risky bodies) but entire populations. Quarantine, however, is more than simple forced immobility. Technologies of self-isolation, flexible confinement, social distancing, and the policing of compliance rely on activating individuals to coproduce their own and others’ health, or ‘responsibilizing’ citizens. While this concept is central in recent studies of public health, we lack insight into how responsibilization shapes how ordinary people construe and navigate bodily and public space in pandemic times.Our project investigates quarantining strategies and practices as central public health tools against pandemics and the processes of responsibilization that seek to make them effective. By illuminating the nexus of quarantine and responsibilization, the project will significantly contribute to the history and theory of disease prevention. Using an interdisciplinary approach involving historians, sociologists, and anthropologists, thereby bringing together transregional and comparative perspectives, we will pursue three interrelated axes of analysis:(1) the circulation of quarantine knowledge in global public health discourses,(2) the history of quarantine during the Spanish Flu in the United States, and(3) current practices of quarantine in response to coronavirus in South Africa.While (1) takes a transregional perspective to reconstruct the history of increasingly shared knowledge and norms of disease control, and their (post)colonial legacies, the case studies in (2) and (3) focus on the implementation and negotiation of quarantine on the ground. Both in the US and South Africa, these efforts have been shaped by race, which plays a fundamental role in the social and spatial order of public health in both societies. We understand pandemic space and its construction via quarantine as conceived through expert knowledge, regulated by public health institutions enacted by ordinary citizens, and cutting across multiple scales in a context of worldwide viral spread. Our main research questions are: How have pandemic space and quarantining strategies been conceptualized and codified in international/global health discourses? Which social groups have been considered as responsible citizens, and what role has race played in this respect? What scientific observations and popular assumptions about personal space and sanitation have directed public health debates towards responsibilized behavior, and how have they been taken up by ordinary citizens?