A Matter of Life and Death: Exploring the Necropolitical Limbo of Kingston’s Housing Crisis in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

For decades, Kingston, Ontario, the “prison capital of Canada,” has experienced a steadily worsening housing crisis shaped significantly by the city’s carceral practices—not just in its prisons, but in other surveilled parts of the city. Since the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kingston’s housing crisis and the carceral practices that shape it have become more visible; in response to these practices, unhoused people have formed tent encampments throughout the city. In this paper, thinking through one encampment at Belle Park, we consider how public health and municipal authorities’ surveilling attempts to protect unhoused people from the novel coronavirus may, paradoxically, entrench unhoused people’s marginalization and exacerbate their risk of death. We draw on necropolitical theory and, specifically, the state of exception, to demonstrate the ways in which unhoused people in Kingston have been newly perceived as threats to the survival of the city during the COVID-19 pandemic and have, as a result, endured new forms of violence. Based on our theoretical analysis, we argue that the actions of municipal and public health authorities to contain COVID-19 subject unhoused people to a necropolitical limbo, an in-between-life-and-death-world that arises not exclusively as the consequence of war, slavery, incarceration, or other exceptional circumstances, but as the product of public health governance.