Despite what governments of the world with their bottom-Iines want us to believe, the pandemic rages on. The WHO reports that COVID-positivity rates have tripled across Europe in the past six weeks. Fifty-three countries in the European-Central Asian region reported nearly 3 million new cases last week, with nearly 3,000 deaths each of the last five weeks. Countries have scaled back on testing and new variants of the virus are exploding. An increasing number of nursing homes and other carceral institutions in Canada have outbreaks. Hospitals throughout North America are short-staffed, emergency departments in rural settings and Indigenous communities in Ontario are shuttering their windows, and health-care systems worldwide are reportedly on the verge of collapse.

Thus, it seems as relevant as ever to remind readers/listeners of BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY about the special issue of the International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 4, (1) June 2021, that I guest edited whose theme is “Philosophies of Disability and the Global Pandemic.” This outstanding issue, whose table of contents appears below, is open access.

Front Matter

Introduction: Philosophies of Disability and the Global Pandemic

Shelley Lynn Tremain

Articles

Philosophy of Disability, Conceptual Engineering, and the Nursing Home-Industrial-Complex In Canada

Shelley Lynn Tremain

Old, Broken, Disposable: Critical Discourse Analysis of the Public Health Narrative About At-Risk Populations During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Costa Rica

Gabriela Arguedas Ramírez

African Communitarian Philosophy of Personhood and Disability: The Asymmetry of Value and Power in Access to Healthcare

Elvis Imafidon

Zoonosis and the Polis: COVID-19 and Frantz Fanon’s Critique of the Modern Colony

Emily Anne Parker

Carceral Politics, Inpatient Psychiatry, and the Pandemic: Risk, Madness, and Containment in COVID-19

Suze G. Berkhout, Lindsey MacGillivray, and Kathleen Sheehan

Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment in the Era of COVID-19: Systemic Social Oppression and Discourses of Risk in Public Health and Bioethics

Sara M. Bergstresser

COVID-19 and the Disinheritance of an Ableist World

Johnathan Flowers