Claire Laurier Decoteau - "Emergency" - Cal Lee Garrett

Claire Laurier Decoteau will discuss Emergency: Covid-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life. She will be joined by Cal Lee Garrett. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op. 

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested by not required). 

About the book: In Emergency, sociologist Claire Laurier Decoteau documents and theorizes the emergencies of COVID-19 by looking at the experiences of Chicagoans and the policies that shaped their lives. She describes the uneven racial impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latinx Chicagoans as a crisis within a crisis, caused by a convergence of emergencies: a state of emergency that protected white supremacy and wealth, the slow emergencies racially marginalized populations have faced for decades due to the long-term gutting of care infrastructure and deindustrialization, and the sacrifice “essential workers” were asked to make to protect the United States economy.

As Decoteau shows, the city’s “racial equity” project used data to determine which communities would be given scarce resources, but once positivity or death rates declined, resources were retracted and redistributed elsewhere. City officials thus attempted to manage these converging emergencies by manipulating epidemiological data and orchestrating systems for interpreting that data. Decoteau makes clear that the emergencies precipitated by COVID-19 long predated the pandemic, and that we will continue to live with their compounding crises if we do not tackle their structural underpinnings.

About the author: Claire Laurier Decoteau is associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Ancestors and Antiretrovirals: The Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

About the interlocutor: Cal Lee Garrett is assistant professor in the department of sociology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.