COVID-19, the State, & BAME Communities

In this week’s episode, host Laura Haapio-Kirk is joined by Dr Tamara Dragadze, Dr Igor Cherstich (University College London), and Dr Ashraf Hoque (University College London) to discuss the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had upon BAME communities, and the implications of this both for society at large, and for anthropology as a discipline. 

Why are some BAME communities affected so much worse than mainstream society? What’s missing in the way we’re discussing these issues at the moment? And what can this tell us about the relationship between the individual and the State? In this episode we set out to unpack some of these questions.

Today’s guests combine research expertise in issues surrounding ethnicity, migration and diaspora, political identity, and the role of the State:

Dr Dragadze’s career has specialised in ethnic conflict, and she has done fieldwork in the Caucasus, Southern Russia and Rwanda. She has also been on the LibDem Immigration Policy making Committee as their Expert Social Anthropologist.

Dr Cherstich is currently a core member of the team for the ERC project CARP - Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics. He conducted fieldwork in Libya before and after the 2011 revolution, and is co-author of Anthropologies of Revolution (University of California Press, 2020). For Italian speakers, he also has a recent article in Gli Stati Generali on the pandemic and the fetishization of ‘freedom’.

Dr Hoque’s research centre on issues of migration and diaspora, the anthropology of Islam, and political anthropology, and he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in England (Luton and Tower Hamlets) and Bangladesh. He is the author of Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton (UCL Press, 2019), as well as a recent article called ‘Striving to be better in Britain’.

At the beginning of the episode, Dr Hoque refers to several public reports on the impact of COVID-19 upon BAME communities. The Office of National Statistics published some initial findings in May 2020; and Public Health England also published their early findings in June 2020. They subsequently published a more comprehensive report after this episode was recorded, in August 2020. 

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