Books by Sophie Lachapelle
Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, 2021
The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research Volume 10, 2021
Edited by Steven Kohm, K... more The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research Volume 10, 2021
Edited by Steven Kohm, Kevin Walby, Kelly Gorkoff, Katharina Maier and
Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land The University of Winnipeg Centre for
Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS) ISSN 1925-2420
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Papers by Sophie Lachapelle
Health, Risk, and Society, 2022
The discipline of public health is generally considered to advance a universal good and is often ... more The discipline of public health is generally considered to advance a universal good and is often discussed as a moral and ethical mission that aims to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own health. However, the ardent promotion of public health discourses can also result in the hyper-policing and surveillance of marginalised communities, where the capital required to adhere to risk management is often systemically lacking or unobtainable. These consequences have become more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many people who are unable to follow public health guidelines to mitigate risky behaviours-for example, due to homelessness-are punished in increasingly carceral ways. In this article, we propose the notion of colonial affect as a conceptual tool to understand the ways in which public health deploys the affective language of risk to justify the carceral management of citizens. We mobilise examples of strategies invoked to manage unhoused people during the COVID-19 pandemic in two Canadian cities, Vancouver, British Columbia and Kingston, Ontario, noting how public health uses the affective language of risk to carceral ends. Such an interdisciplinary analysis of public health and carcerality helps reveal the palpable, yet slippery, characteristics of carceral spaces in our current epoch.
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Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Annual Review of Interdisciplinary Justice Research, 2021
For decades, Kingston, Ontario, the “prison capital of Canada,” has experienced a steadily worsen... more For decades, Kingston, Ontario, the “prison capital of Canada,” has experienced a steadily worsening housing crisis shaped significantly by the city’s carceral practices—not just in its prisons, but in other surveilled parts of the city. Since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kingston’s housing crisis and the carceral practices that shape it have become more visible, as in response to these practices, unhoused people have formed tent encampments throughout the city. In this paper, thinking through one encampment at Belle Park, we consider how public health and municipal authorities’ surveilling attempts to protect unhoused people from the novel coronavirus may, paradoxically, entrench unhoused people’s marginalization and exacerbate their risk of death. We draw on necropolitical theory and, specifically, the state of exception, to demonstrate the ways in which unhoused people in Kingston have been newly perceived as threats to the survival of the city during the COVID-19 pandemic and have, as a result, endured new forms of violence. Based on our theoretical analysis, we argue that the actions of municipal and public health authorities to contain COVID-19 subject unhoused people to a necropolitical limbo, an in-between-life-and-death-world that arises not exclusively as the consequence of war, slavery, incarceration, or other exceptional circumstances, but as the product of public health governance.
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Books by Sophie Lachapelle
Edited by Steven Kohm, Kevin Walby, Kelly Gorkoff, Katharina Maier and
Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land The University of Winnipeg Centre for
Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS) ISSN 1925-2420
Papers by Sophie Lachapelle
Edited by Steven Kohm, Kevin Walby, Kelly Gorkoff, Katharina Maier and
Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land The University of Winnipeg Centre for
Interdisciplinary Justice Studies (CIJS) ISSN 1925-2420