COVID-19 has revealed deep inequalities in our societies based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, age and region. These inequalities have also been marked by national borders and borderings especially between the global North and South. Orientated between India and the UK, we adopt a mobile and doubly reflexive lens characteristic of a diasporic consciousness to focus on conditions of care and carelessness in the two countries in the face of a global health crisis. We add another lens to the professionalised and the community-based aspects of the “careless society” – that carelessness invokes accidental (careless) as well as a wilful, structural disregard (care-less) that is propounded by the state. Hereon, we denote this conceptual conflation as care/less and examine its articulations in four main overlapping areas: (i) of leaders and the reproduction of privilege; (ii) in undervaluing care labour; (iii) in marginalising people of minority racial or ethnic backgrounds; and (iv) in the lack of investment in social infrastructure.

The full article by Professor Shirin M Rai and Professor Raminder Kaur can be found here: COVID-19, Care and Carelessness | Countercurrents