Contagious Divides

Speaking on bodies, space, and forms of governance in the context of health and race for RICE SoA’s spring lecture series, Nayan Shah gave a brief genealogy of public health and its impacts on urban environments, particularly Chinatowns in the United States. According to Shah, racial and class differences have been woven into policies and perspectives about health security. Chinatowns—loci of the rising anti-Asian violence ignited by today’s pandemic—are but one spatialized form of these systemic biases. “The sourcing and racializing of disease” are strategies of displacing blame that will “never solve the problem of infection.” Shah called upon architects and designers to “challenge the ideas about how people and pathogens are put together.” Society will face “a reckoning with living and dying in a variety of different ways,” he said. “We’ll need to see how we’re going to incorporate that into our lives—or if we’ll enter the 2020s desperately trying to forget it all.”