Timezones

8pm to 9:30pm, Melbourne Australia AEST

11am to 12:30pm, London

12pm to 1:30pm, Johannesburg

The zoomlink will be sent prior to the event.

All welcome!

Organisers:

Mark Davis & Narelle Warren, School of Social Sciences, Monash University

E: mark.davis@monash.edu; narelle.warren@monash.edu

Videos from previous seminars and abstracts for future seminars can be seen here.

Facilitated by Microbio\Social Futures & Association for Narrative Practice and Research

Image Description - Asia Pacific Vaccine Access Facility (APVAX) Philippines. Distribution, preparations and vaccination in public school in Las Pinas, Caloocan City.

Artist - Eric Sales, 2021

ABSTRACTS + BIOS

What do COVID-19 measures mean to those on low incomes in Bangladesh: lived experience, inequity, and power

Abul Kalam

Using a narrative approach during the first phase of pandemic in Bangladesh (March-June 2020), this study aimed at understanding how lower income people in urban areas experience COVID-19 and the difficulties complying with public health advice (work from home, stay at home, isolate or quarantine) to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The narratives showed a number of interlinked aspects of inequalities which make lower income people were vulnerable in terms of health risks and livelihoods.

Self-quarantine and physical distance are essential to slow the spread of COVID-19, but it is difficult to follow this advice for the lower income people who live in urban crowded environments with their families in one room with communal toilet facilities. When there is an infected person in the family others might be easily infected with COVID-19. In addition, due to working conditions, it can be extremely difficult to work from home, stay at home and maintain social distancing. For example, rickshaw pullers, street vendors, day laborers, barbers cannot perform their work by staying at home and avoiding physical contact. While authorities and experts have recommended digital technologies to avoid physical contact, it is not easy for lower income people to adopt such strategies into their regular work. People from lower income groups also reported that they did not get adequate support from the government during the lockdown phases, forcing them to leave the cities and return to their village homes to cope with the sudden economic and health crisis.

While everyone has been facing the pandemic's risks, the lived challenges of the lockdowns have been felt most acutely by the poor, the vulnerable, those in the informal sector, and without savings and safety nets. Effective responses to COVID-19 require attention to social inequality to increase the capacities of all to protect themselves and their families from the pandemic.

Bio: Abul Kalam is a medical anthropologist based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. After completing his Bachelor and Master Degrees in anthropology, over the last eight years, much of his research involves informing health and nutrition programs from a socio-cultural and ecological lens. His research experience with diverse communities in Bangladesh, from rural to urban areas, across plain lands and deep hills, is based on grounded theory approaches. His core training in anthropological theories and research methods has especially prepared him to bring socio-cultural nuances to health and nutrition challenges.

A Distant Kind of Death: Funeral and Burial Scenes During COVID-19 in Rwanda

Theogene Ngirinshuti, MSc Candidate in Global Health Delivery,Harvard Medical School

Aalyia Feroz Ali Sadruddin, Assistant Professor of Cultural and Medical Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

All of us have likely heard, read, or written personal accounts of loss, stunted grief, and the absence of opportunities to be in the physical presence of loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. This presentation reflects on the ways that COVID-19 conditions affected funerary ceremonies in Rwanda. Akin to other parts of Africa, funerals and burials in Rwanda are social events that are widely attended by biological and nonbiological kin. Both ceremonies afford the living a final opportunity to commemorate and carry out individual and religious rituals on behalf of the dead. Drawing on the experiences of family members and friends in Rwanda and the diaspora, we meditate on what is at stake when death, and by extension death-related ceremonies become events at which near and dear ones are honored in accordance with international public health protocols, which for the most part, do not take into consideration locally specific rites and rituals. Our findings suggest that even though physical and social distancing rules barred Rwandans from attending funerals and participating in burials, many continued the work of mourning and venerating the dead with family and community members according to their own ritualistic beliefs.

Bios: Theogene Ngirishuti is a MSc candidate at Harvard Medical School. He is currently doing research on COVID-19 management among citizens and refugees in Rwanda. Prior to taking up his studies at Harvrd, Theogene worked as a student services coordinator at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda and taught philosophy at Arrupe Jesuit University in Zimbabwe. He holds a MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from London School of Economics and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Zimbabwe.

Aalyia Feroz Ali Sadruddin is a cultural and medical anthropologist who studies aging, care, and health in postconflict settings. Over the last decade, she has carried out ethnographic fieldwork on emergent kinship configurations and everyday practices of elder care in Rwanda. Educated in Kenya, South Africa, and the United States, Aalyia combines multiple theoretical traditions and methods in her research to think through questions of knowledge production and the politics of representation in the academic world. Her articles have been published in Anthropology Now, Medical Anthropology, and Social Science & Medicine.