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The Viral Underclass / Steven Thrasher

Aug 16 2022
"A lot of people want to help one another. And we see this with how the majority of people are still for mask mandates, and for vaccine requirements, and our leaders are failing us in business and government. So people do want to help one another. I think the ways in which mutual aid and certain kinds of organizing the consciousness around this has expanded to a much larger group of people have been phenomenal. And certainly in 2020 when a lot of office workers were working from home they found a lot more satisfaction in spending parts of their lives getting groceries for their elderly neighbors or organizing things in the neighborhood. And so that has been a powerful way in which people understood we don't have to be reliant solely on our workplaces, or certain commercial things in the ways that we can connect to one another. And this has made a lot of people appreciate the time more that they spend with their neighbors and their friends."

American studies scholar Steven Thrasher talks about his book "The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide"

 

Guest

Steven Thrasher

Steven W. Thrasher is the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg Chair of social justice in reporting (with an emphasis on issues relevant to the LGBTQ community) and an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University.

Steven Thrasher's Northwestern faculty page

 

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