In the name of health: affect theory and the role of public health risks in the creation of carceral spaces

The discipline of public health is generally considered to advance a universal good and is often discussed as a moral and ethical mission that aims to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own health. However, the ardent promotion of public health discourses can also result in the hyper-policing and surveillance of marginalised communities, where the capital required to adhere to risk management is often systemically lacking or unobtainable. These consequences have become more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, as many people who are unable to follow public health guidelines to mitigate risky behaviours – for example, due to homelessness – are punished in increasingly carceral ways. In this article, we propose the notion of colonial affect as a conceptual tool to understand the ways in which public health deploys the affective language of risk to justify the carceral management of citizens. We mobilise examples of strategies invoked to manage unhoused people during the COVID-19 pandemic in two Canadian cities, Vancouver, British Columbia and Kingston, Ontario, noting how public health uses the affective language of risk to carceral ends. Such an interdisciplinary analysis of public health and carcerality helps reveal the palpable, yet slippery, characteristics of carceral spaces in our current epoch.