David Fryer: Critical Reflections on Global Unemployment in the Wake of the Global Pandemic: Psychological Crisis Upon Health Crisis?

Is the world confronted currently by two interconnected crises: 1) scientifically demonstrable health consequences of the global pandemic in the form of misery, mortality and morbidity; and 2) scientifically demonstrable health consequences of the global unemployment resulting from the pandemic and the policies intended to contain it in the form of additional misery, mortality and morbidity?

Organisations such as the ILO, politicians and commentators tend to answer in the affirmative.

In this presentation, I will subject the ‘knowledge’ base, which is discursively positioned as supporting this claim, to critique.  However, critique, within the critical frame of reference of my presentation, does not involve discursively positioning claims in general or this claim in particular as ‘true’ (or false) but as “making it so that what is taken for granted is no longer taken for granted” (Foucault, 1981)  and “pointing to the possibility of ‘otherness’”(Hansen, 2016). The issue, then, is not whether the claim is true or false but what difference it would make to whom if it were acted upon as if unproblematically true (or unproblematically false) and what is positioned as necessarily the case is not so and could be otherwise.

David

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