COVID-19 and the biopolitics of stigma in public housing: dividing practices and community boundaries in pandemic times.

The COVID-19 'hard lockdowns' in Melbourne, Australia in 2020 targeted public housing estates thus trading on perceptions of risk associated with public housing as some of the most stigmatised sites in post-industrial cities. This article draws on interviews with Melbourne public housing tenants on their experience of COVID-19 lockdowns to analyse the place of stigma in residents' accounts. Pairing Wacquant et al's (2014) concept of 'territorial stigma' with sociological work on the biopolitics of stigma we consider the dynamics of stigma, tracing how it functions to delimit community boundaries and justify pandemic containment measures.

Post-retirement enlightenment syndrome: Worthy of investigation.

Post-Retirement Enlightenment Syndrome is a term used by some in illicit drug policy to reflect the experience of having politicians "come out" in favour of drug policy reform only after retirement. To date, the phenomenon has not been examined in any systematic manner. While discussions of the phenomenon on social media tend to be playful, they nevertheless express real frustration with the reluctance of privately supportive sitting politicians and policing officials to speak out in favour of non-punitive and/or harm reduction-oriented policies.

Pandemic policing and the construction of publics: an analysis of COVID-19 lockdowns in public housing.

COVID-19 responses have cast a spotlight on the uneven impacts of public health policy with particular populations or sites targeted for intervention. Perhaps the starkest example in Australia was the 'hard' lockdown of nine public housing complexes in inner-city Melbourne from 4 to 18 July 2020, where residents were fully confined to their homes. These complexes are home to diverse migrant communities and the lockdown drew public criticism for unfairly stigmatising ethnic minorities.