Viral politics. Protection lifelines granting differentiated conditions of vulnerability during the COVID-19 outbreak in Brescia.

By conceptually following the argument according to which the Covid-19 pandemic is not acting as a “great equalizer”, this chapter aims to construct a preliminary account of specific protection spaces in the context of Brescia, Italy. Examining the pandemic operative spaces of protection means to navigate through the contested connections and fractures between movements, (im)mobilities, privileges, and vulnerabilities9 as well as their infrastructures of power relationships and forms of socio-spatial inequalities. Epidemiological data, lockdown policies, and media contents are used as preliminary examples to explore the hypothesis according to which the pandemic policies have assumed the form of ambiguous and unequally accessible infrastructures of protection, depending on the specific (im)mobility regimes implemented in Brescia. An ambivalent condition of life saving and risk exposure is here considered as what characterizes the operative formations, in that they are assemblages of precarious conditions of vulnerability featuring strategies and circumstances of living together in the time of Covid-19.