Notes from Our Delhi Workshop – Somatosphere

By the end of 2023, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 public health emergency to be over. With this announcement came the realisation that, despite an abundance of publications, online debates, and solitary reflection, it remained difficult to know how to think about what we had lived through – or even what it meant to say that something had “ended.” The pandemic was too large, too intimate, and too unevenly distributed across lives and places for any single language to contain it. Perhaps because it proved so hard to name, a dominant global impulse was to move on: to turn away, to fold the disorder of those years quietly into the past. Yet if anything can be said with certainty about the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that it marked a biopolitical rupture – one that not only rendered biopolitics newly visible, but also exposed tensions and contradictions that the biopolitical framework itself struggled to contain.

Our project took this discomfort as its starting point. We wanted to hold a space in which academics and frontline workers could sit together, search for words, and articulate the kinds of questions that emerge after a biopolitical crisis, when the dust has settled just enough. And because the pandemic disrupted the most basic premise of anthropological work – the “field” – we started to think around the concept of biopolitical fieldwork to prompt our thought process.

 The project organizers – Yasmeen Arif, Timothy Campbell, Davide Tarizzo, and Esca van Blarikom – proposed biopolitical fieldwork as a methodological intervention in response to the radical reconfiguration of both “the field” and the social itself in the wake of the COVID‑19 pandemic. During lockdowns, states of emergency, and rapidly shifting regimes of care, control, and valuation, fieldwork no longer took place within stable sites or established relations but unfolded as a biopolitical encounter: governance, life, risk, and inequality were experienced in real time, often without available concepts to qualify what was happening. Through the notion of biopolitical fieldwork, we invited contributors to reflect on how they came to know local forms of governance as they were enacted across bodies, infrastructures, metrics, and affects.

Rather than offering a unified theory of the pandemic, the organizers proposed this concept to open a space for posing new questions: What counted as a field under conditions of restriction and uncertainty? What did the field become, and how was it inhabited? How do the concepts used to qualify life during COVID‑19 intersect with biopolitics, even indirectly?

Between 2024 and 2025, we organised three cross-disciplinary workshops to engage with these questions in Salerno (Italy), Delhi (India), and Ithaca (USA). The Delhi workshop, held at Shiv Nadar University on 13–15 December 2024 and supported by the Wenner‑Gren Foundation, was our most experimental and the subject of this essay. Rather than assembling formal papers, we brought people into conversation: philosophers and anthropologists, but also an architect from Mumbai, a community medicine doctor from Odisha, a Delhi‑based lawyer, and a group of local and international students.

The result was generative: our conversations were in turns exhilarating, disorienting, and grounding. It was also a moment where the project finally felt like a laboratory of thought: a place where key concepts frayed and re‑knit themselves in real time.

The workshop opened with a keynote by Veena Das, Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who traced the pandemic through the lens of the household. Rather than reach for “super‑concepts,” she stayed close to the grain of the everyday: the chores, frictions, and small negotiations that were stretched and twisted by the pressures of lockdown at the level of the household. Covid, she suggested, appeared extraordinary only when abstracted from these textures; on the ground, it was the ordinary becoming strange. Her framing of the epidemic as something “evented” through the household produced recurring tensions: between event and occurrence, crisis and continuity, memory and forgetting.

If we started thinking from the household in Das’s keynote, our conversations over the next two days pulled us outward into spaces where governance, care, and daily life intersected – and often collided – during the pandemic. Across contributions, participants returned to a shared question: how the pandemic reconfigured “location” as both an analytic and political problem. Where does the pandemic happen? To whom? On what terms?

For some, like Alex Nading, this meant the collapsing of domestic and wage-labour spaces. Lockdown collapsed the spaces of wage‑work and domestic life into the same rooms, mediated by apps and platforms, while risk itself became a digital choreography: dashboards, curves, and colour codes through which we were prompted to modulate behaviour. There was a familiar theoretical echo here: Gilles Deleuze’s Societies of Control reappeared as the everyday micro‑checkpoints of logging in, checking out, and being nudged back into line.

For Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, the pandemic exposed South Africa’s “stratified liveability.” If the virus was the same, the conditions for care were not. Those already marginalised were least able to isolate, most exposed as “essential,” and most likely to shoulder gendered, domesticised care under the banner of home‑based care. She asked what it meant for states to presume the givenness of effective domestic care as if every household was equally bounded, resourced, and safe, and whether those presumptions did not themselves undermine care from the start.

Conversations grounded in situated experiences of the pandemic, from Mumbai and rural Odisha, unsettled the very category of “home.” Rupali Gupte introduced us to the Covid Glossary, a crowdsourced project developed at her architecture school in Mumbai. In that glossary, students and teachers contributed words that captured their pandemic experiences – from the mundane to the surreal – creating a loose‑leaf archive of how people actually lived the event.

Through this lens, she invited us to rethink the home. In Mumbai’s chawl housing, the home wasn’t simply the 200‑sq‑ft box behind the door but the network of corridors and shared spaces that thickened social life. These spaces, suspended between public and private, became protective buffers during lockdown, absorbing household shocks, such as the intensification of domestic violence during the pandemic. The inverse was also true: when the “home” was confined to its interior, it often became a pressure cooker for fear, violence, and claustrophobia.

For migrant workers, Rupali reminded us, the home wasn’t the rented room they slept in; it was the city. To shut down the city was to dis‑house these workers.

A different spatial logic emerged in community medicine doctor John Oommen’s reflections from rural Odisha, which pushed us to reconsider the household as an analytic category altogether. Among the Adivasi communities he works with, the “household” is not the built structure but the village itself. The small structure called a “house” is simply where things are stored. Life happens outdoors, and that outdoor life inadvertently protected many people in the first waves of Covid. Ventilation, Oommen reminded us, was something these communities understood implicitly long before scientific consensus caught up.

Yet despite low transmission risk, the impact of lockdown on these communities was devastating. School closures cut off educational mobility; families purchased smartphones and climbed hillsides searching for signal, all for online classes that barely functioned. Authoritarian – even irrational – mandates around cremations eroded trust in hospitals and pushed people to evade care. He asked whether India’s “Covid event” was in fact less about the virus and more about the lockdown as political strategy, a point that resonated widely.

Surveillance emerged as another site where biopolitics was both contested and reworked. Roma Chatterjee showed how in places like Dharavi, surveillance could function as a resource: to be counted was also to stake a claim to residency and citizenship – until those same instruments were re‑purposed to quarantine or stigmatise “wrong populations.” Harish Naraindas pushed this further, underscoring the double edge of surveillance through connecting digital IDs to the spectre of bio‑sorting, and provoked us with a question: what happens to biopolitics when you centre alternative medical epistemologies that do not even recognise “virus” as an operative category?

Other threads gathered force as well: Frédéric Keck traced “One Health” back through animal surveillance, noting how techniques developed in farms migrated to humans (and how, in French, confinement carried agricultural connotations before it named human lockdowns). Subhashim Goswami spoke of deaths that refused narrative closure; and Ravi Nandan Singhtraced the bureaucracy of death from disaster manuals to Amazon shopping carts for body bags, as families quietly domesticated care for the dead to avoid state protocols.

3. Biopolitical Epistemologies

As these discussions showed, debates about “location” were never only spatial: they were also epistemic. How people inhabited risk – whether in corridors, villages, protest sites, or data infrastructures – shaped what forms of knowledge became visible, credible, or ignored. This opened onto a second set of questions: what kinds of knowing the pandemic made possible, constrained, or newly fraught.

Davide Tarizzo argued that Covid condensed a troubling shift in Western scientific culture: a narrowing of epistemic diversity and the rise of dogmatic beliefs in public health, where doubt was no longer treated as science’s foundational condition. He read the ostracizing of dissenting scientists during Covid as a symptom of a broader political colonization of science, in which emergency rhetoric trumped open discussion.

His intervention provoked much debate. Frédéric Keck sketched the media‑lab‑institution ecology through which authority is manufactured (and unmade). His point was to remind us that scientific personas are produced within knowledge markets and that some “dissent” travels as branding as much as critique.

This opened the discussion up to discuss the concepts of science, culture, and the social in the context of the pandemic. Soumyabrata Choudhury distinguished between a living history of science and biopolitics (which tends to instrumentalise that livingness), asking how to keep the space of not‑yet‑knowing open when policy demands teleology. Alex Nading reminded us that the fallback on culture can reproduce the very justifications used to withhold life‑saving therapies in earlier crises; instead, he argued, we need to track how people pragmatically braid biomedical and other epistemologies to do politics by other means.

Two reframings stuck. First, planetary vs. global: as Frédéric proposed, the “planetary” is not just a bigger map, it is a milieu. The bat‑forest‑market‑city is an entanglement that global health (designed for populations) struggles to grasp. Second, data as institution (Yasmeen Arif’s phrase): “detail” becomes “data,” and the social gets harvested; the political question is not only what data but who commands it, to what ends, and with what protections.

Lawyer Arpan Acharya shifted us from epistemology in the abstract to epistemology in law. He argued that during the pandemic, the courts performed certainty not necessarily to reflect scientific clarity, but to answer a middle‑class demand for certainty. The way the court then responds to that demand for certitude does not always have anything to do with science but gives an appearance that it does. In the process, cherished constitutional doctrines (like equality’s demand to avoid both over‑ and under‑inclusion) become pliable, and as such pandemic governance acquired a legal sheen it did not always merit.

Acharya’s second point was about data. He showed how India runs two privacy regimes: (1) a high‑protection track for EU citizens’ data processed in India, contractually obligated by cross‑border commerce; and (2) a low‑protection track for Indian citizens, whose data are far more exposed to state access. The implications are clear: privacy has been globalised as a contract rather than guaranteed as a right, and jurisdiction, not principle, decides whose personal information is priced and whose is cheap. This is what it means to treat data as an institution: it has custodians, rules of access, and constituencies – and it creates subjects.

4. Implications for Biopolitical Fieldwork

Looking back, what the Delhi workshop offered us was not resolution but orientation. It clarified the stakes of our project, not by narrowing them but by thickening them: home became a corridor, a city, a protest camp; care became infrastructural, improvisational, sometimes automated; certainty became a performance that law and medicine each wielded differently; data became an institution with its own jurisdictional politics; and, as Yasmeen Arif reminded us, the social re‑emerged as the hyphen that keeps “bio” and “politics” from collapsing into each other.

Most of all, it became clear that the pandemic is not done with us simply because the emergency phase has ended. It persists in the afterlives of lockdown policy, in the architectures of data we now inhabit, in memories that have faded unevenly, and in the solidarities that appeared briefly before dissolving again. This Delhi workshop, in that sense, was a hinge point in our project: the moment we began to articulate not just how to think about the event of COVID‑19, but how to think with it – and to keep the questions alive in the places where people actually live them. That is ultimately the point: not closure, but to keep our concepts as open as the lives they’re meant to describe.

We are indebted to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for supporting this workshop, and to students and personnel at Shiv Nadar University who helped us organize it. We thank Veena Das for her wonderful opening keynote. Finally, we are grateful to Ellen Hausner and the wider editorial team at Somatosphere for their continued support in the publications of this series.

We also want to thank the participants in our workshop for the stimulating conversations: