WHEN EMERGENCIES END BUT OBJECTS REMAIN: THE AFTERLIVES OF COVID-19 INTERVENTIONS IN PUBLIC SPACE IN KENYA

Richard Kiaka, George Ayodo

Abstract


The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented proliferation of public health interventions across Kenya. Face masks, hand-washing stations, sanitizer dispensers, and instructional posters rapidly became central instruments through which biomedical authority governed bodies, movement, and social interaction. Several years after the lifting of restrictions, however, these interventions persist in public and private spaces in states of disuse, neglect, or symbolic repurposing. This paper examines the afterlives of COVID-19 interventions in Kenya and asks what happens when tools of emergency health governance outlive the crisis they were designed to address. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and photographic documentation conducted between June 2024 and January 2026, we argue that many COVID-19 interventions have undergone a shift from active biopolitical instruments to what we conceptualize as infrastructures of exhausted agency. That is, they are material health objects that remain physically present yet no longer exert practical, moral, or regulatory force. Once central to disciplining bodies and shaping social interaction, masks, hand-washing stations, dispensers, and posters now exist as silent witnesses to a crisis that has ostensibly passed. Their persistence reveals how emergency governance leaves durable material traces that outlive political urgency, institutional maintenance, and public attention. Rather than representing infrastructural failure or ruin, their persistence reveals the temporal limits of biomedical authority, and the fragility of emergency health infrastructures once institutional urgency dissipates. Situating the analysis within medical anthropology, we contribute to debates on health governance, materiality, and temporality by showing how public health emergencies generate durable material residues that continue to shape everyday environments well beyond the moment of crisis.

Keywords


medical anthropology; COVID-19; infrastructure of exhausted agency; materiality; temporality; afterlives of crisis, public health

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejsss.v12i3.2212

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