Feminist epistemologies place value on disrupting dominant ways of knowing. Personal experience and struggle can serve as transformative sites of meaning-making. I have lived experience of sex work and of organised crime. In 2018, I endured two crown court trials, both as the wife of the defendant, and as a victim. This article will interrogate the complexities of occupying such liminal spaces and the role of emotion as a way of knowing.

This article interrogates the experience of introducing a micro-learning approach during the COVID pandemic and provides my reflections. It is argued that lectures delivered as micro-learning ‘chunks’ are preferable to traditional lectures in several ways, and that they facilitate rich and innovative seminar classes (Ahearne, 2021a; 2021b). The article concludes that some of the adaptations made during the pandemic should be retained afterwards if they enhance the student learning experience in that area of study.

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The positioning of the ‘other’ as a dangerous vector of disease is a long-standing trope. This has existed both in racial terms, such as the 1905 Aliens Act, and for others positioned as on the outliers of society, such as sex workers, under the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864, 1866, 1869 (Hamilton, 1978). The public health system has long been used as a system of control, alongside its self-described role as existing for the betterment of population health.  Similarly, other aspects of our health system have long functioned both as a foundational part of the welfare state, and as key perpetrators of racial injustice and part of the carceral state.  This is most obvious in the psychiatric system, where there continues to be a disproportionate detention of black men (Singh, 2007).  Injustice, surveillance, and even mass detention, that is enacted within a health systems framework is rarely given the same critical focus as other systems of power, such as the criminal justice system – which has been highlighted by the reality that various recent reports into racial discrimination only give a brief mention to the role of healthcare systems in perpetrating various injustices (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2016).  During the pandemic the healthcare system has increasingly been used as a justification for advancing a state apparatus of biopower, and has experienced little resistance from the organised left.