• The shortcomings of the regulatory state and its corporate actors in allocating resident physicians in rural areas in Germany, Andrea Futterer
• Securitization and Economization of hospitals – structural aspects of individual health care and their challenges, Alexander Roppelt
• Crisis vulnerability assessment tool considering human and technological structures as well as social support through private relations and state actors, Kati Orru, Margo Klaos, Kristi Nero

Panel description

The COVID-19 pandemic is impressively showcasing the societal importance of health & care infrastructures during disasters. While health infrastructures are in numerous political strategies listed as critical infrastructures to be upheld during disasters, care infrastructures (such as childcare, ambulatory care or nursing homes) are mostly offside and deprived of the attention of public bureaucracies and disaster relief organisations alike. Moreover, health infrastructures are regularly reduced to highly visible central nodes, such as hospitals or nursing homes. On the contrary, decentral elements of health & care supply are widely side-lined. This becomes most obvious with regard to the common neglect of ambulatory care infrastructure, home care settings and ambulatory medical treatment in disaster planning.

Health & care infrastructures exceed the realm of technological functionality and embrace a social dimension. Arguably, care infrastructure in its various forms and for different socio-demographic groups crucially depends on social interaction and empathy, thus goes beyond the technical fixes of those infrastructures that are usually in mind when talking about critical infrastructures. Therefore, thinking about upholding health & care infrastructures urges us to question the tacit assumptions around the making of critical infrastructures. Yet, maintaining health & care infrastructures crucially depends on the functioning of those classical technical infrastructures that supply, and sometimes even enable, care work. Health & care infrastructures are thus situated in a complex socio-technological entanglement that brings us to (re-)consider the role of factors such as gender, ability, class, sexuality and race in the making of critical infrastructures – as a central element in disaster management.

The panel seeks to challenge current modes of disaster management along three frictions:

• Commonalities and differences in the protection of different (socio-)technical (critical) infrastructures
• Modes of protection for central and decentral infrastructures
• The being and making of critical infrastructures

We welcome contributions that deal with questions including, but not limited to, the following:

• How are health and/or care infrastructures addressed in current disaster research and management?
• What is different about the protection of central and decentral (critical) infrastructures?
• How can we conceptualise core functionalities of health and care infrastructures?
• What is critical about critical infrastructures?
• How are societal power hierarchies naturalised by dominant framings of critical infrastructures?
• What assumptions are foundational for the making of critical infrastructures and who is thereby (dis)advantaged?
• For whom is what kind of infrastructure critical?
• What role do empathy and care play in critical infrastructure protection and disaster management?
• What social and psychological aspects regarding patients and relatives are relevant in the emergency planning of health and care infrastructures?