China’s response to HIV and Covid-19: social exclusion, stigmatisation and invisibility

Doctoral research in progress by Xu Liu (they/them)

Based on the existing research of HIV stigmatisation and the novel situation in the public health issues of COVID-19 in China, this research intends to explore the formulation and reproduction of pandemic politics from the categorised population groups’ daily life to China’s handling measures and policies, as well as the derived results. This research would examine the particular public health agendas of pandemic through the following aspects: the collectivist, totalitarian administration’s control of resources and discourse power, the formulation of ‘the knowledge of pandemic’ and pandemic politics within collectivism ideology, the cultural impacts on people’s identity of concepts related to the pandemic, and the circulation of potential negative outcomes, including stigma, inequality and the invisibility of vulnerable groups.

At the current stage, this research would include four parts of case studies:

1. The Origin of Pandemic Identities: Creating, Directing and Transforming Biopolitics and Biological Citizenship
2. The System of Administrative Health Intervention: Collective Securitisation with Top-down Discipline of Individuals and the Rationalisation of Governmentality
3. Categorised Publics in Pandemics: the Disciplined ‘Moralists’, Stigmatised ‘Patients’ and ‘Carriers’, and the Decline of Individual’s Possession of Problematic
4. The Discursive Exercise, Production, and Reproduction of Knowledge, Power and Politics of Pandemics: the Rationality and Internalisation of Inequality and Stigmatisation

From three aspects, including Communication/Propaganda, Policymaking/Implementations, Individual’s Experiences and Practice of Public Health Agendas, this research would conduct relevant projects through the following methods: discourse analysis, online/off-line ethnography, and interviews.

There are two research projects in process:

• Origin of Pandemics, Pandemics Identity and Its Transformation in China’s Narratives and Practice of Public Health Agenda: The Controlled Information and the Formulation of Images
• The Gap between the Pandemic Publics and the Administration of Public Health: Categorisation of Identities within the Process of Policymaking and Intervention

 

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Xu Liu is a PhD researcher at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths. Before returning to the university, Xu Liu was a journalist who published various articles about China’s disasters (such as the 2015 Tianjin Explosions) and public health issues (mainly about people living with HIV/AIDS in rural areas of China).