Dissertation Introduction: What Care Homes, Prisons, and Slaughterhouses Have to do with Schools

Sneak peak- here is the introduction to my dissertation: 

This dissertation was completed at an inflection point. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijiah McClain, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, and too many others sparked protests, and uprisings against police brutality and state violence in the United States and around the globe, asserting: Black Lives Matter. The global coronavirus pandemic and its rising death toll brought the deepest economic recession since the Great Depression, resulting in unprecedented levels of unemployment and economic distress with the most profound effects on Black communities, as well as other communities of color. The pandemic held hostage millions of workers, especially essential workers, in a capitalist system asserting profit rates and the stock market take primacy over human lives. The virus, though indiscriminating in its nature, navigated the built economic landscape to target those made most marginalized and vulnerable by racial capitalism.In its most succinct form, this pandemic became a story about care homes, slaughterhouses, and prisons. The three hotspots for infection and COVID deaths happen to also be three illustrative spaces of a neoliberal form of racial capitalism and settler colonialism built on patriarchy. The country with the highest prison population in the world, highest incarceration rate, and most bloated policing budgets of OECD countries turned even more repressive during the pandemic, subjecting thousands of prisoners to exposure to the deadly virus and enforcing illegal solitary confinement, while those outside the prison walls remained subject to ongoing aggressive and brutal policing. Care homes for the elderly, disabled, and veterans too became spaces of confinement and deadly exposure, with workers in these facilities often devalued and underpaid for the work of care. Slaughterhouses, a vignette of an extractive and environmentally destructive capitalist enterprises already with dangerous working conditions, became petri dishes for the coronavirus, risking their precarious work- forces to life-threatening infection. With school canceled, at least the education system, already under the pressures on ongoing austerity, was spared as viral loci. But the switch to online learning and work left households facing a difficult balance of caregiving, teaching, and left many without adequate resources.