(dis)empowerment & disease

The ecology can afford people the ability to meet their needs, but it also can constrain: other people can disenable individuals’ ability to meet their needs—sometimes unwittingly, but often a matter of practice and policy. People are agentic and will rely on the fungibility of power to meet their needs, but in ecologies with greater constraints on need fulfillment (i.e., disempowering ecologies), the less power people have to begin with. In highly-constraining ecologies, fungibility transactions can lead individuals to “overdraw” in some domains to meet needs in others. As individuals attempt to empower themselves in these contexts, including paying these need “debts,” it can lead to a downward power spiral, sometimes culminating in death.

Given that 1) infectious disease is the outcome of interpersonal interaction, and 2) that stigma (i.e., racism) will shape people of color’s ability to meet their needs in fungibility transactions, I have examined how ecological constraints on empowerment can place people of color at increased risk for infectious disease transmission as they attempt to meet their needs. I have examined HIV and COVID vulnerability—the two pandemics of our time—through this lens.