Dr Diego Silva1
1University Of Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Diego Silva is a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Sydney Health Ethics, University of Sydney.
Abstract:
Global health and public health occur in place, i.e., it occurs somewhere, specifically somewhere with meaning to humans (to borrow from Yi-Fu Tuan’s classic formulation). Although place as a unit of analysis has a long history in a variety of disciplines (e.g., geography, architecture, urban planning, etc.) attention to the ethical and political importance of doing health in place has been, with some notable exceptions, absent in the bioethics literature. The COVID-19 pandemic provides several illustrations of this phenomenon, e.g., the snap lockdowns of the public housing towers in Melbourne, Australia; the detection of Omicron leading to travel bans of persons from southern African countries; national boarders being closed to their own citizens and residents; etc. These examples suggest that decisions were driven by concerns about safety and risk, but the locations of these events were usually ignored as morally relevant factors in decision-making. Therefore, an underappreciated – or outright ignored – aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic globally was the importance of where public health response measures occurred and how these places and decisions were fundamentally value-laden. Using Lisa Eckenwiler’s work on placemaking, as well as Jeff Malpas’ recent work on the history of epistemology and ontology of place and its role in helping build a person’s notion of identity, this paper will outline the various morally relevant dimensions or factors of place in the context of infectious disease ethics, i.e., a conceptual mapping exercise, and the ramifications for global health governance.