Pandemic Death Discourse critically engages the notion of “death as the greatest equalizer,” revealing how mortality, far from being neutral, exposes the deeply social, gendered, racial, geopolitical, and economic contours of life and death during the initial onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the heart of this collection lies a call to recognize and communicate dignity in bare lives (Alvarez et al. 5). Edited by M. F. Alvarez, Carmen Hernández-Ojeda, Alexander B. Joy, and Gyuri S. Kepes, this anthology brings to light the syncopated mechanisms of discourse that undermine equity—whether through media hyperbole, public narratives, social media, or the weaponization of racial identity. One of the most vital contributions of the book appears in its final section, where educational practices are framed as a site of resistance to the neoliberal impulse to silence and deny death.
The volume examines how systemic violence—particularly the kind designed to be denied—became more visible during the pandemic. Each chapter addresses a specific aspect of this erasure. For instance, Gyuri Kepes’s chapter unpacks the enactment of racialized violence by drawing a line between the death of ER doctor Frank Gabrin due to a shortage of N95 masks and the murder of George Floyd in an act of police brutality. In both cases, struggles for breath become a shared symbol of systemic failure and racialized erasure (Alvarez et al. 84). Other chapters further examine the workings of necropolitics and the silencing of the “Other.” Carmen Hernández-Ojeda’s chapter opens the volume by introducing the paradigm of necropolitics, a theme that is extended further by Alexander B. Joy’s analysis of the consumption of death in photography. Joy expands that analysis in a later chapter by examining the role of social media as a necropolitical space of enactment, where isolation and digital interaction together reveal the shifting dynamics of the “digital other.” Adding to this framework, M. F. Alvarez introduces the term “indispensably disposable” to describe the paradoxical condition of Filipino healthcare workers. Alvarez defines the term as “a paradoxical subject position enacted through discursive and material practices that bares existing frictions between colonizer and colonized, center and periphery, the necrophilic and the biophilic” (Alvarez et al. 63). The tension inherent in this disposability—shaped by racial identity and colonial history—illuminates the visceral scale of precarity faced by these essential yet expendable workers.
A majority of the chapters in the collection approach death as a metric through which the moral ambiguities of the pandemic—and the limitations of neoliberal capitalism—can be critically examined. A key strength of the volume lies in its narrative focus: each chapter grounds its critique in the lived experience of individuals, effectively mobilizing case studies to illuminate larger systems of oppression. Yet, beyond this narrative anchoring, it is the diverse investigative frameworks that significantly deepen the collection’s critical impact. For instance, Alvarez’s discussion of Kanlungan, framed as a counterdiscourse, underscores the historical continuity of resistance and its evolving forms (Alvarez et al. 77). In contrast, Kepes’s analysis introduces ontological questions through environmental philosophy, engaging materiality in ways that unsettle conventional discourse. Taken together, these two contributions exemplify the range of analytical modes activated throughout the anthology—modes that reimagine communication, criticism, and resistance in a time of mass crisis.
This collection distinguishes itself from other volumes on COVID-19 by dedicating its final three chapters to modes of resistance grounded in academic practice. These chapters confront the self-inflicted blindness within higher education, where discussions of COVID-19—its deaths, its traumas, its ongoing presence—were often sidestepped or ignored altogether. The connective thread between these contributions is their refusal to treat the pandemic as a closed chapter; instead, they highlight the urgency of addressing its ongoing impact. By exposing the mechanisms of silence and denial, these chapters propose concrete ways to enact accountability and to make visible the systems that have rendered millions of deaths marginal footnotes to institutional narratives. Notably, Kepes and Alvarez call for a redefinition of “(post)pandemic pedagogy” as a trauma-informed practice—one that encourages students to speak about death, dying, and grief as part of their intellectual and emotional development. “Although hampered by social and institutional pressures and rife with emotional challenges,” they write, “we argue that facilitating conversations about loss in the classroom can teach compassion, cultivate a dialogic relationship with death, and foster a deeper appreciation of life during a pandemic and beyond” (Alvarez et al. 9). This commitment to pedagogical transformation makes the collection not only a critical scholarly intervention but also a generative tool for reshaping how we teach, grieve, and imagine justice.
While the collection’s analytical depth is commendable, one lingering tension emerges in its occasional reliance on a “post-pandemic” framing. Although the term is often used to structure academic and public discourse, its use here sometimes implies a sense of closure that risks flattening the ongoing nature of the crisis. The conditions Pandemic Death Discourse interrogates—racialized medical violence, systemic invisibility, economic disposability—did not begin with COVID-19, nor have they ended. Grief, long COVID, and structural precarity persist. A more explicit challenge to the very notion of “post-pandemic” could have further sharpened the book’s temporal critique, acknowledging that for many communities, the pandemic is not a discrete event in the past, but an ongoing and compounding trauma. Though the collection acknowledges these shortcomings, a more thorough examination of the escapism embedded in the notion of a “post” to the pandemic could have opened up further avenues for critique and contribution.
Across its chapters, Pandemic Death Discourse deconstructs death in the pandemic not as a great equalizer, but as a process of manufactured invisibility, where some deaths are rendered more “necessary” or narratively useful than others. This collection challenges readers to confront the politics of death, visibility, and value in a time of crisis, offering a critical resource for scholars in the health humanities and beyond.
Works Cited
Alvarez, M. F., et al. Pandemic Death Discourse: Denial, Disparity and the Promise of Communication. McFarland & Company, 2025.
