Epidemic, Migrant Labour, and the Politics of Life

Speaker: Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group

 

And in conversation with Prof. Binod Khadria, Former Professor of Economics and Education and Migration, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

While scenes of migrant workers walking in long processions caught the cameras of the journalists, it still requires to be asked: What lay behind these long marches? How do caste, race, gender, and other fault lines operate in governmental strategies to cope with a virus epidemic? If the fight against an epidemic has been compared with a war, what are the forces of power at play in this war against the pandemic? What indeed explains the sudden visibility of the migrant workers in the time of a public health crisis?