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Pandemic Police Power, Public Health and the Abolition Question

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  • © 2022

Overview

Authors:
  1. Tryon P. Woods

    1. University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA

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  • Centres anti-blackness to understand police power, public health and inequality
  • Argues that policing health and social issues deserve a much deeper debate
  • Contributes to scholarship on black social movements and existential thought

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Introduction: Racial Sacrifice and Abolition in the Pandemic Year

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 1-25

  3. Reconceptualizing How Policing Works

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 27-41

  4. Reform, Violence, Capital, and Prison Abolition

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 43-85

  5. The Police Power of Finance, Technology, Housing, and Education

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 87-108

  6. Evaluating COVID-19 Testing, Infection, Mortality, Treatment, and Vaccines

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 109-162

  7. Efficacy, Eugenics, and Law in the Modern Vaccine Regime

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 163-216

  8. Black Life-Matters, Medical Racism, and Health Self-Determination

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 217-252

  9. Conclusion: The Abolition Question for Medical Science

    • Tryon P. Woods
    Pages 253-265

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 267-277
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Keywords

About this book

This book critically explores how police power manifested beyond criminal law into the field of public health during the pandemic. Whilst people were engaged with anti-police violence protests, particularly in the US, they were being policed openly and notoriously by the government and medical science in the public health arena. The book explores how public health policing might be an abuse of constitutional power and encourages the abolition question to be applied consistently to the state’s discourse in the area of public health, as black people the world over continue to bear a disproportionate cost burden for public health policies. The chapters explore contemporary policing in terms of the historical context of slavery, the growth of the police and prison abolition movement and how this should be applied more widely, and how police power operates throughout society beyond the criminal justice system, in finance, technology, housing, education, and inmedicine and health science. It seeks to re-examine our relationship to health sovereignty and the police power more fundamentally. It provides insights into the convergence of policing and social control of humans and argues that the most normative response is abolition.



















Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA

    Tryon P. Woods

About the author

Tryon P. Woods is Associate Professor of Crime and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, USA, and Special Lecturer in Black Studies at Providence College, USA. Dr. Woods has worked with community-based organizations in New York City, Seattle, and Oakland on HIV/AIDS prevention, supportive housing for drug users, and police accountability. He is the author of Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the “Post-Racial” Era (Michigan State 2019); co-author of the forthcoming Ex Aqua in the Mediterranean: Excavating Black Power in the Migrant Question (Manchester UP); and co-editor of Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation (Lexington 2016) and On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness (Africa World Press, 2015).

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