Disturbing the Aesthetics of Power: Why Covid-19 Is Not an “Event” for Fieldwork-based Social Scientists
(2020) , 5 pages
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- Authors
Nyenyezi Bisoka, Aymar 
- Abstract
- The Black Models exhibition is an analogous representation of the colonial relationship that has plagued the social sciences for the last four centuries, which often has made invisible the work of local researchers from the Global South. These parallels are particularly evident in the unequal racial distribution of roles, and of vulnerability, in difficult research contexts. Such inequality of conditions has led to a universalist monologue that is already pervading the social sciences with regards to post–Covid-19 scenarios. How will body-instruments continue to be used for data collection in dangerous and difficult African contexts? Covid-19 offers an opportunity to question the new discourse of Western academics who commission studies in the Global South. For research assistants, this new discourse is just another contradictory monologue, in the same way that Black Models is. For them, Covid-19 is not an “event,”21 an accident that radically reverses the normal order of things. It does not contain the conditions for a radical change in the phenomenon of the exploitation of certain bodies for research purposes. Those bodies have a color: Black.
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Citations
Nyenyezi Bisoka, A. (2020). Disturbing the Aesthetics of Power: Why Covid-19 Is Not an “Event” for Fieldwork-based Social Scientists (Covid-19 and SSRC 5). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/168308