Note from interviewee Anita Say Chan: In the weeks since this interview, we’re all encountering a world that is by no means an unforeseen event or disaster attributable to the novel biology of the virus alone, but indeed, a symptom of an already-ailing system decades (or more) in the making. The breathtaking loss and destruction we now see didn't just happen far away, in some abstract "elsewhere," and it didn't happen overnight because of a virus. It advanced gradually, over time, with every mundane decision to ignore precarity either locally or globally, or to exacerbate vulnerability by disinvesting from civic infrastructures and public capacities (and normalizing such divestments), thus feeding what Nancy Fraser has called the "crisis of care" (h/t Lisa Nakamura) that devalues care work–even as the essential nature of nursing, among other disciplines, is made all the more apparent. We are, and have been, in need of a global reset; not as some version of salvation that someone else brings, but as a new terms of being that allows us to recognize the differential agencies we do lend, and have lent, to our own local and worldly contexts, and that we might now work in relationaly if new forms of worldly connection are to emerge.
