Immunities in the Covid age
A Sociomaterial and More-Than-Human Perspective
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6452575 |
|---|---|
| Authors | D Lupton (0000-0003-2658-4430, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Theory & Health (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1477-8211 • E-ISSN: 1477-822X |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1057/s41285-025-00224-x |
| OpenAlex | W4412177754 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 65 |
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the topic of human immunity has received intense attention in the scientific literature and public forums: often in contested, highly politicised and confusing ways. A plethora of terms involving immunity have appeared in news reports, government announcements and academic articles: herd immunity, hybrid immunity, immunity gap, immunity debt, immunity theft, immunity evasion, immunity escape and immunity wall. In this essay, I discuss the diverse discourses, logics, practices and biopolitics of contemporary representations and understandings related to immunities in the wake of this continuing crisis. Building on recent scientific ideas about the dynamic nature of personal immunity and engaging with more-than-human social theory, I argue for an alternative conceptual approach that recognises the complex dimensions and interdependencies of sociobiological immunity systems. From this perspective, human immunities are vibrant agential capacities that are both biographical, unique to the individual, and multiple, sited in and distributed across multi-species relations and social and biological conditions. This approach can help us move beyond the individualism, immunitary moralism and anthropocentrism that have pervaded immunitary mechanisms and discourses in the COVID age
2019-20 coronavirus outbreak · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Epistemology · Outbreak · Perspective (graphical · Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2 · Sociology · Computer Science · COVID-19 epidemiological studies · COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts · Medicine · Philosophy · Vaccine Coverage and Hesitancy · Artificial Intelligence · Internal Medicine · Virology
The Face Mask In Covid Times
Designs for the Pluriverse
Volatile Bodies
Medicine as Culture
Covid-19 mortality and deprivation
A postmodern Pandora's box
Leaky Bodies and Boundaries
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
Understanding vaccination resistance
The necropolitics of neoliberal state response to the Covid-19 pandemic in India
Risk
Covid-19-related stigma and its sociodemographic correlates
Clinical outcomes and risk factors for Covid-19 among migrant populations in high-income countries
Governing Covid-19 without government in Brazil
The necropolitics of Covid-19
Biopolitics After Covid
Contesting public forgetting
Bugs in the blog
Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic
Sanitary Passports and the Birth of the Immunized Self
The “living dead” within “death‐worlds”
Flexible Bodies
Containment and Leakage
Kinetic health
Immunitary Life
How and why patients made Long Covid
We are fierce, independent thinkers and intelligent
Getting Ahead of One's Self
Gut Buddies
Multispecies Studies
Memes Save Lives
Postcolonial Global Health, Post-Colony Microbes and Antimicrobial Resistance
Porous Bodies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |