Shame and the Pandemic

As the pandemic continued to rage through 2022, the World Health Organization declared monkeypox to be a public health emergency of international concern. Moving beyond the book’s focus on 2020, the series concludes by hearing from Dr João Florêncio, Professor Luna Dolezal, Dr Fred Cooper and Dr Arthur Rose on the challenges that monkeypox, COVID-19 and, before it, AIDS-HIV pose to habits of intimacy, sexuality and togetherness. What happens ‘after’ the pandemic, we conclude, is not just a matter for dealing with the ‘next’ outbreak, but the legacies of epidemics that have gone before. Further Resources To read more about João Florêcio’s work on AIDS and homophobia see his article in The Conversation; AIDS: homophobic and moralistic images of 1980s still haunt our view of HIV – that must change. Benjamin Weil’s article Poxed and Abandoned further discusses how these echoes have framed the global response to monkeypox. These themes are also elaborated in the BMJ opinion piece Blame and shame are harming our response to monkeypox. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z. Hosted by Paul McNally and produced by Volume.

When Boris Johnson announced the government’s plan to deliver 10 million tests a day - Operation Moonshot - on the 9th of September 2020, he claimed it was to return life to normal. But it was also clearly an effort at saving face and reputation management. In this episode, we hear from Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal on the problems of using expansive rhetoric to deflect reputation damage. As an alternative to these and the other shame-intensive practices of the series, the team proposes a Shame-Sensitive Public Health that might address the more corrosive effects of shame in the pandemic. Further Resources To read more about Operation Moonshot and the UK government’s efforts to save face during 2020 see the chapter Operation Moonshot: Notes on Saving Face by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Also see Gemma Milne’s The Guardian opinion piece This 'moonshot' hype only illustrates No 10's obsession with tech hyperbole. To hear more about attempts at ‘face saving’ and the UK’s testing programmes see the BMJ Blog post ‘Saving Face’ and Public Health Policy during Covid-19 by Arthur Rose and Luna Dolezal. For more about the idea of shame-sensitivity and principles for shame-sensitive practice, see the article Beyond a Trauma-Informed Approach and Towards Shame-Sensitive Practice by Luna Dolezal and Matthew Gibson. To see these ideas applied to public health contexts, see the policy document Shame-Sensitive Public Health and Covid-19 by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose, on the WHO’s Behavioural and Cultural Insights into Health Policy Hub. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome...

From public eruptions of anti-Asian violence to emerging data on the respective mortality rates of white and ethnic minority healthcare workers, it became rapidly clear that the pandemic landed in ways that followed well-worn lines of racism in the UK. In this episode, we hear from Dr Nikita Simpson on the phenomenon of the ‘Leicester Lepers’, in which racialised communities were subject to increased stigma over their supposed inability to follow public health advice. Dr Fred Cooper explores how complex systems of structural racism and shame and individual experiences of public shaming intersected, and how shame was heightened by a political refusal to directly address questions of racism and race. Further Resources To further understand how shame, stigma and racism intersected during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, see the chapter Coughing while Asian: Shame and Racialised Bodies by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Nikita Simpson’s work with Laura Bear and the Covid and Care research group at LSE also deals significantly with questions of shame and stigma, and you can find out more about their work - and read their project reports - here. Nini Fang and Shan-Jan Sarah Liu also have an excellent article on ‘being Yellow women in the time of COVID-19’, which addresses anti-Asian racism and shame. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z. Hosted by Paul McNally and produced by Volume.

During the first year of the pandemic, politicians made appeals to the ‘common sense’ of the British public, especially when the government’s loss of control over the pandemic became particularly conspicuous. Against the exemplars of ‘common sense’ were set ‘covidiots’: those whose actions were taken as displays of exemplary stupidity and ignorance. In this episode we hear from Dr Fred Cooper, Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal who discuss the appeal to ‘common sense’ as a rhetoric of public health, which shifted responsibility away from political failures and towards ‘covidiots’, people whose failure to use common sense cast them as enablers of the pandemic. Further Resources For more on the use of ‘common sense’ as a public health strategy in the UK during Covid-19, see the Blog post Shame, ‘Common Sense’, and COVID-19: Notes from Mass Observation by Fred Cooper and the chapter Good Solid British Common Sense: Shame and Surveillance in Everyday Life by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. To learn more about the hashtag #covidiots and other incidents of pandemic shaming see the chapter Covidiots!: The Language of Pandemic Shaming by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. To learn more about Covid neologisms see Amanda Roig-Marin’s article English-based coroneologisms: A short survey of our Covid-19-related vocabulary and BBC Radio 4’s Word of Mouth episode The Language of the Pandemic. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the

On the 5th of April 2020, Downing Street announced that Boris Johnson, then UK prime minister, was in hospital with Covid-19. When he was discharged, he blamed the severity of his condition on his weight: “I was too fat”, he declared. In this episode, we explore some of the consequences of this statement with Professor Luna Dolezal and Dr Tanisha Spratt: how it fed into the government’s subsequent Tackling Obesity campaign, and sanctioned existing patterns of fat shaming as support for the NHS. We then fit this into larger patterns of shaming in the pandemic, which often served to target those whose actions didn’t conform to wider expectations. Further Resources For a deeper discussion of the Tackling Obesity campaign and its relation to fat shaming, see this article by Luna Dolezal and Tanisha Spratt, Fat shaming under neoliberalism and COVID-19: Examining the UK’s Tackling Obesity campaign and the chapter I was too fat: Boris Johnson and the Fat Panic by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Also see Rachel Cooke’s The Guardian opinion piece Why Boris Johnson's new anti-obesity strategy makes me reach for the chocolate. The Social Market Foundation report further outlines why the Tackling Obesity strategy was not an effective public health policy. To read more about fat shaming and its relationship to neoliberalism, see Tanisha Spratt’s article Understanding ‘fat shaming’ in a neoliberal era: Performativity, healthism and the UK’s ‘obesity’ epidemic. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z. Hosted by Paul McNally and produced by

As the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the world in early 2020, healthcare professionals were frequently named, blamed and shamed for spreading the virus. In this first episode of Shame and the Pandemic, we hear from Professor Luna Dolezal and Dr Arthur Rose, researchers from the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in Covid-19 project at the University of Exeter. They discuss examples of health worker shaming and war metaphors, opening up an in-depth discussion of shame and shaming which lays the groundwork for the rest of the Shame and the Pandemic series. Further Resources For more on the shaming of healthcare professionals during COVID-19, see this article Covid-19, online shaming and healthcare professionals by Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose and Fred Cooper in The Lancet and their chapter Super-Spreaders: Shaming Healthcare Professionals in Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. Stigma and the Logics of Wartime gives a short account of wartime metaphors. If you are interested in the broader question of wartime rhetoric, read Franziska Kohlt’s article Over by Christmas. Listen to The Nocturnists’s award-winning Shame in Medicine: The Lost Forest audio documentary series for a deep-dive into shame experiences among healthcare workers. The Nocturnists Stories from a Pandemic series also gives insights into the experiences of healthcare workers during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Acknowledgements Thank you to Alice Waterson. Further thanks to Jennifer Allan, Ray Earwicker, João Florêncio, Tanisha Spratt and Nikita Simpson for contributing to the series. This podcast series is based on the research findings in the book Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK, by Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose. This podcast series was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant number AH/V013483/1. Further support has come from the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (WCCEH) at the University of Exeter, the Shame and Medicine project, the Scenes of Shame and Stigma in COVID-19 project and the Wellcome Trust grant number 217879/Z/19/Z. Photo by