Articles by: Warwick Anderson

Author Biography:

A medical doctor and historian, Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History and the Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney. His latest book (with Ian R. Mackay) is Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity (Johns Hopkins, 2014). He has written on the beach as a space of contamination in the COVID-19 response, on the biopolitics of disease modelling, and on how not to have theory in an epidemic.

When the General Calls: Military Tactics Against COVID-19 in Australia

…the lesson of history that I'd so reluctantly distilled was, in effect, to organise the Australian vaccine rollout as if it were a practice of pacification and counterinsurgency. That is, to follow the style of colonial militarisation from which ‘ordinary’ public health had derived over a century ago...

Standing up Straighter against COVID-19?

The Morrison government plans to amend the Defence Act to make it easier to deploy the ADF domestically at times of national emergency.

Informit: Unmasked: Face-work in a pandemic

The enhanced cultural symbolism of the mask indicates that even in these times of social distancing we live in a world of social encounters fraught with meaning.

Unmasked: Face-work in a Pandemic

The vehemence of debates, especially in the United States, over whether to mask or unmask indicates that far more is at stake than simple infection control.

Informit: Confessions of a race traitor. [Racism and science are intimately bound up in Australia’s tropical history.]