Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società

Descrizione del progetto

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has radically changed the political and social scenario in most countries of the world. Italy has tackled the health crisis by resorting to a variegated set of legal means: the declaration of the State of Health Emergency was followed by many decrees and administrative provisions, while a previously unknown strategy, lockdown, was experimented. For the first time in national history, people were forced to stay at home, except for special reasons. While Italy opted for this kind of solution, based on confinement and the restriction of individual mobility, other countries, especially in southeast Asia, chose a different and apparently opposed strategy, centered on contact tracing and controlled mobility. This project aims at questioning what in both scholarly and public debate is commonly perceived as an antithesis between these two paradigms of health crisis management. The polarization and rigid dualism will be questioned by showing the vast common ground they share both from a sociological, legal and historical point of view. To this end, an interdisciplinary approach will be taken: the historical reconstruction of the genealogy of these different practices and techniques will go hand in hand with a sociological study of how they actually work at different social levels, and with a legal insight into their implications in terms of rights and liberties. Moreover, both practices of restriction and techniques of mobility tracing will be framed through the same concept of “health bordering”, where the “-ing” is meant to capture the active and performative nature of the legal, institutional and technological tools devised to enforce sanitary borders. In this regard, the concept of “health bordering” will be defined as a dynamic process from which new social, institutional and legal borders arise, changing preexisting social landscapes and reshaping individual autonomy. It will therefore denote a wide Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca MUR - BANDO 2022 set of strategies, technologies and legal as well as administrative techniques aimed at knowing, governing and regulating individuals’ movement to face health situations. By following this triple perspective, the project will make it clear how, far from being polar opposites, “confining” and “tracing” strategies are just variations on a same range of possibilities. Despite their manifest differences, both of them share a common element: the need for control. Confining and tracing therefore, can be considered as complementary options that can be mixed in different proportions to obtain different institutional recipes, but that virtually never occur without each other.

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