A Viral Pedagogy: Undoing Things with Long COVID’s Autoimmunities

Abstract

This article focuses on the scientific and political transformations that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to engender through its impact on the epistemological and ontological foundations of autoimmunity. By discussing an online seminar taught during the COVID pandemic winter of 2020–21, the article considers how the viral autoimmunities involved in severe and long-haul COVID pathogenic mechanisms have fostered transformative pedagogical and therapeutic experiences, spaces, and events. As a highly contagious viral disease, COVID highlights disparities in access to healthcare, whereby certain (racialized, disabled, ageing) bodies are unequally burdened with the labor of staying alive. Predicated on a foundational separation between inside and outside, or between the internal, vulnerable, visceral space of the individual(ized) “human” body and an external(ized), hazardous, contaminated, foreign environment, COVID measures for avoiding viral exposure became paramount, reciting a genealogy of distancing, protection, containment, and isolation. By examining how concepts and practices of autoimmunity animate cutting-edge biomedical research, this article asks, How does autoimmunity undo normative models of health predicated on a militarized model of immunity? How might the viral shift our understanding of autoimmunity and what might autoimmune conditions teach us about virality? In short, what can autoimmunity and the viral show us about uncertainty, care, and transformation in therapeutic and pedagogical contexts?