Article ID: CBB572762308

The Crisis of Crisis: Rethinking Epidemics from Hong Kong (2020)

unapi

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses—what is an epidemic?—from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself.

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Authors & Contributors
Luk, Yi Lai Christine
Chan-Yeung, Moira M. W.
Mason, Mike
Marian, Meaghan Jeannine
Street, Alice
Thomas, Gaëtan
Concepts
Public health
Colonialism
Epidemics
Postcolonialism
Medicine and society
Disease and diseases
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
20th century
20th century, early
Places
Hong Kong
China
Taiwan
South Asia
Papua New Guinea
Sierra Leone
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