30 October 2024
The COVID-19 pandemic has left an indelible mark on nearly everyone, whether through the loss of loved ones, the strain of lockdowns, or the looming uncertainties about health and the future. But while the virus affected everyone, it didn’t affect everyone equally.
This stark reality has underscored how pandemics—including Covid, HIV, monkeypox and even the Spanish flu of 1918—amplify pre-existing inequalities, disproportionately impacting vulnerable and marginalized communities.
Prof. Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, a renowned scholar, journalist, and author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide is a remarkable voice on social justice, public health, and inequality, and he came to share his recent findings at London Met, in an interdisciplinary talk sponsored by the Gender and Sexual Diversities Research Group with the School of Art, Architecture and Design and the School of Computing and Digital Media.
In conversation with Prof. Sunny Singh, an award-winning novelist and anticolonial scholar, Prof. Thrasher unpacked the complex layers of inequity that define modern pandemics and examined the social structures that deepen these divides.
Prof. Thrasher, who had landed in London from the USA just a few hours before his talk, has witnessed firsthand how viruses intersect with forces like racism, capitalism, homophobia, and ableism.
He understands that the paths viruses take—how they spread, whom they impact, and the devastation they leave behind—are shaped far more by social structures than by biology alone, in a phenomenon he dubbed the “viral underclass.”
In his book by the same name, he introduced his theory, bringing to light one of today’s most urgent social justice issues: how pandemics reveal and deepen society’s existing fault lines.
His talk was illustrated by heart-wrenching stories of people who have been the victims of such inequalities, and although the message was stark, it was presented with humanity and humour.
Image: Prof. Steven W. Thrasher and Prof. Sunny Singh.