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2. The Biopolitics of Infectious Diseases, Vaccines, and Settler Colonial Whiteness on Lingít Aaní (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

Author

Kersch, Adam

Subjects
Southeast Alaska, Historic Background Research, United States and Canada, 1918 influenza epidemic, Ethnohistoric Research, Race, infectious disease, Settler colonialism, Ethnographic Research, COVID-19 pandemic, Tlingit, vaccines, biopolitics, Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, whiteness, Sitka, Alaska
Abstract

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This research project examines transformations in the relationship between race and biopolitics in Sitka, Alaska, focusing on infectious disease outbreaks over the past 200 years. Specifically, I interrogate the intersection of whiteness and infectious disease and suggest that the politicized concept of whiteness has shifted dramatically. I hypothesize that: 1) over the course of Russian and US rule, whiteness has served as a political matrix through which colonial powers consolidated biopolitical control of Native Alaskan Tlingit populations and that 2) during our current pandemic, whiteness serves as a matrix that threatens to undermine biopolitical cohesion and biosecurity of the Sitkan Tlingit and non-Native population. This research ? conducted with approval from Sitka Tribe of Alaska and Sealaska Heritage Institute ? seeks to understand how practices of biopolitical racialization have formed, changed, and retained their historical residues. This project contributes to medical anthropology and provides vital insight into attitudes toward public health measures during a pandemic. Such information is immediately useful to tribal governments and public health officials mitigating COVID-19?s impacts. It simultaneously analyzes the interplay between race, colonialism, and public health in the context of infectious disease outbreaks.

Published
2021
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5. Asylum in Crisis: Structural Violence and Refugees in Siracusa, Italy

Author

Kersch, Adam

Subjects
Anthropology
Abstract

In recent years, unprecedented numbers of migrants have arrived in Italy due to political, religious, ethnic and economic instabilities in West and North Africa and the Middle East. Simultaneously, the Eurozone Crisis and neoliberal austerity measures left the Italian government struggling to administer healthcare and legal services to all migrants. This study investigates the provision of essential services by the Italian state and two non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Emergency and ARCI, respectively providing free medical and legal services, to incoming migrants in Siracusa, Italy. It analyzes migrants' perceptions of these services and evolving goals in Europe. Building upon preliminary fieldwork conducted in 2014, in January to July 2015 I undertook six months of participant observation in a migrant reception center and legal offices in Siracusa. During my research I conducted 72 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with migrants, NGO activists, lawyers, and doctors, and state physicians. This study analyzes Emergency's role as an entrance to the Italian healthcare system and ARCI as a facilitator of legal aid to migrants. I argue that the clinic's position on the outskirts of Siracusa functions as a means of exclusion, exacerbating divides between the local population and incoming migrants. Additionally, I provide insight into the provision of legal services to migrants in Siracusa, as well as how these migrants navigate geopolitical and legislative borders, and these borders' roles within the politics of the European Union and neoliberal ideologies. I argue that selective enforcement of asylum legislation and dearth of legal aid to migrants motivates many migrants to clandestinely flee Italy to seek futures in other European nations, consequently moving "burdens" of migrant reception. This research contributes to public policy and scholarship on health and migration policy as well as politics of conflict, while shedding light on the critical role of NGOs in a complex humanitarian crisis occurring in Southern Europe.

Published
2016

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