"Death and Dying in COVID Times: Necropolitics of ECMO"

c/o Radical Philosophy Hour

 

 

 

INDIVIDUAL

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 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

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GROUP

consciousness conceptualization 'distance' from power? vulnerability

"Abstract: The realities forged - and exacerbated by - the COVID19 pandemic have occasioned broader engagement with an otherwise esoteric means of life-support, Extracorporeal Membranous Oxygenation. Commonly known as “ECMO,” this technology functions as a simulated placenta, an exogenous system for oxygenating and circulating blood in gravely ill folks. ECMO is a so-called “heroic measure,” a last ditch and often futile intervention in the care of critically ill adults who are out of other options. ...

death dignity ACHILLE MBEMBE NECRO-POLITICS

... In this talk, we attend to Mbembe’s necropolitics, determinations of who will live and who will die, that inhere in the healthcare rationing of ECMO. We contrast the necropolitical economies of healthcare across three distinct nursing milieux, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The analytics of necropolitics in ECMO leads us to a critique of the transhuman impulse to attenuate death in the context of neoliberal healthcare economies. We examine the possibilities afforded by new materialist perspectives on the liminality between living and dying in the work and enactment of nursing care. We conclude with a call to speculative ethics for healthcare, attending to current realities while cleaving to what else is possible, a reparatory intervention for the white, cisheteronormative, ableist, colonial, patriarchal structures that enclose terrains of possibility for healthcare and beyond."