Emergency

""Claire Decoteau’s Emergency is a vital read. It is a sociological antidote for our growing collective amnesia about the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing, multiple ravages of racial biocapitalism. May we heed its many lessons."" -- Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz, University of California, Berkeley ""In this meticulously researched and rigorously theorized book, Claire Decoteau paints a disturbing picture of how during the COVID pandemic decades of structural neglect in social welfare and public health accumulated into predictable racial excess  mortality and the sacrifice of frontline workers. Decoteau issues a distress signal to address the fundamental causes of racial and socioeconomic inequity. If unheeded, we are bound to live in perpetual emergencies."" -- Stefan Timmermans, co-author of 'The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels' ""With intimacy and care, Claire Decoteau takes readers into the lives of Black and Latinx Chicagoans whose worlds were uprooted and ended by the novel coronavirus. A local study with global implications and a work of painstaking ethnography,  Emergency: Covid-19 and the Uneven Valuation of Life  lays out how Chicago’s technocratic and bureaucratic Covid response may have given public health officials a lot of data to report, but it did not address the root causes of our racially disparate maps. Emergency is useful for those trying right now to stop the next racialized pandemic, and will be an essential oral history record for scholars of racism and health in the future."" -- Steven W. Thrasher, author of the award-winning book 'The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide' "" . . . Decoteau’s overall point — that racially marginalized groups have been suffering from multiple ‘demics’, which were simply exacerbated by COVID-19 — is crucial, and exceptionally well made. Her comprehensive study will provide a powerful example for those wishing to understand the pandemic. Now, more than five years after the pandemic’s start, the virus is still circulating, and many people are living with long COVID. Emergency is a stark reminder that the deep divisions made visible by COVID-19 are still present in our society. If we do not sit up and pay attention, then the death toll of societies’ most marginalized will continue to rise."" * Nature * ""If Emergency doesn’t leave us much hope for a future beyond racial biocapitalism, it nonetheless provides a damning documentation of the harms of governing through emergency and provides powerful witness to the struggles and resilience of marginalized people in the face of it."" * Social Forces *