Suchergebnisse

When drone footage emerged of New York City's COVID-19 casualties being
buried by inmates in trenches on Hart Island, the images became a key symbol for
the pandemic: the suddenly soaring death toll, authorities' struggle to
deal with overwhelming mortality and widespread fear of anonymous, isolated
death. The images shocked New Yorkers, most of whom were unaware of Hart Island,
though its cemetery operations are largely unchanged since it opened over 150
years ago, and about one million New Yorkers are buried there. How does Hart
Island slip in and out of public knowledge for New Yorkers in a cycle of
remembering and forgetting – and why is its rediscovery shocking? Perhaps
the pandemic, understood as a spectacular event, reveals what has been there,
though unrecognised, all along.

Around 2010, a shift in the EU-understanding of austerity took place – from a future-orientated vision based on concepts of solidarity, cohesion and subsidiarity, to a crisis-driven present shaped around the imperatives of immediate fiscal discipline and debt repayment. This has had contradictory effects, producing widespread divisions, disunity and rising nationalism across Europe on one hand, and new forms of social solidarity and resistance on the other.

Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level