A Radical Reworlding: Discourses of Abolition and Neoliberal Resilience in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the limitations of neoliberal concepts of resilience and the possibilities of abolition in the discourses surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic in Canada. I locate Canada’s state discussions at the outset of the pandemic in 2020 in the neoliberal model of resilience that is rooted in ideologies of individualism and carcerality, rather than the deconstruction of the interdependent systems that create them – despite the temporary questioning of the status quo in political discourse. To contrast the mobilization of neoliberal resilience, I introduce the Doctors for Defunding the Police collective and analyze how they mobilize a more radical praxis by approaching pandemic discourse through a framework of abolition and healing justice. Finally, I draw on Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2023) analysis of the components of reworlding from the Global South, locating the praxis of Doctors for Defunding the Police in this tradition due to its rejection of neoliberal individualism, its embrace of alternative subjectivities, and its turn towards a politics of collective care. Ultimately, I argue that while the 2020 resilience discourse afforded an approach to the pandemic that did not fully abandon the population, it remained fundamentally tied to neoliberalism and racial capitalism, whereas the abolitionist response offered a more transformative praxis of reworlding through its commitment to deconstructing harmful systems and reviving a decolonial praxis of collectivity. To conclude, I examine how the contemporary politics of Covid-19 continue to embrace colonial and carceral realities, necessitating a continued abolitionist praxis of reworlding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".