Challenges for health care politics and policies in (post)pandemic societies

An analysis of healthcare politics within the global milieu is necessary and exigent in order to understand recurring healthcare crises, rising neoliberal governmentalities in the provision of healthcare and global inequalities not only between the global North and South but also the inequalities and precarity within these boundaries. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinvigorated debates around discrimination along caste, gender, race, ethnicity, class and colonial discourses (Platt and Warwick 2020; Gao and Sai 2020). Primarily, this includes unequal access to vaccines, discrimination of access to healthcare, disproportionate death rates, and differential impacts on livelihoods among other issues. This panel will focus not only on the COVID-19 pandemic and its ongoing effects on an increasingly divided world but also our preparedness or lack thereof, for future crises events that require global cooperation. Our primary concern is with the inability of neoliberal and colonial regimes to incorporate equalities of life and ethics of care across the globe. This section brings a focus on the politics of providing, accessing and affording healthcare in increasingly privatised, inaccessible and divisive healthcare systems across the world. Empirically, we seek to explore narratives of excessive privatisation and discrimination in healthcare provisions based on race, class, caste, ability, sexual orientation or gender identity (among others). As Duggan (2003) argues neoliberal expansion has continued to be the focus of policies and politics in major democratic institutions. Healthcare has become one of the worst affected sectors in this regard (Labonté & Stuckler). Of particular interest to us is the reproduction of certain kinds of subjects and lives as being more ‘worthy’ (Giroux, 2006) and ‘grievable’ (Butler, 2003). Such neoliberal and extractivist healthcare systems (Wichterich, 2021) have the effect of producing racial, colonial, sexual, gendered, disabled and aged othering and exclusions (Beckfield, Olafsdottir & Sosnaud, 2013). Further, while the categories of global North and South are suitable for a decolonial analysis, we must revisit these distinctions in light of growing inequalities within both these ‘sets’ of countries. We, therefore, would like to bring forth, through this section, the precarities inherent in the (often neoliberal) politics of healthcare systems across and within different countries. There is an imminent need to counter the exclusions inherent in the currently medicalized models of healthcare by producing and building dialogues with the alternative models of healthcare. Specifically, we need alternative models which problematize the socio-political-cultural dimensions of health and healthcare. Doing so requires engaging with pluralistic epistemologies, methodologies and methods in researching healthcare practices and policies.