1638 Jo Shaw and the disease it engenders together with (“syn”) other issues, such as its wider social and political context. It is the interaction between disease and context that helps to explain not only the “what” regarding the disparate impacts of the pandemic but also something about the puzzle of how and why this happens. Since the inception of the pandemic, an increasing number of studies have exploited similar synergistic thinking. These studies have explored, amongst other matters, the gendered13 and racialized14 nature of the virus’ impact and its exclusionary effects (for example, in relation to working from home and the continued unequal division of domestic labor and now homeschooling),15 the different types of forced migrations which are occurring as well as the exclusionary effects of border closures,16 the challenge of keeping open the routes towards regularization and safe-settlement for asylum seekers and other displaced persons,17 alongside the negative impacts of the pandemic on stateless individuals and groups18 and on minorities such as the Roma.19 Inequality and vulnerability have been common themes, even though these are not concepts that are either easy to define or uncontested.20 In such cases, the issues under scrutiny can be characterized as dimensions of citizenship, understood as issues of status and rights for members of a given polity, defining in many respects how we live within bounded communities and also what the consequences of these boundaries are for non-members. In many cases, the work can also be described as “intersectional” insofar as it focuses on the “interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”21 with regard to issues of membership.22 It has been argued that the use of the term “citizenship” in these types of cases is problematic as it has little explanatory purchase.23 This article rejects that contention and argues that citizenship properly understood provides both a suitable object of study, illuminating many of the ways in which the syndemic/pandemic impacts our lives, as well as an appropriate framing for contestations of the exclusionary effects of COVID-19. Such an analysis can be undertaken using the 13 In the United Kingdom, see Clare Wenham & Asha Herten-Crabb, Why We Need a Gender Advisor on SAGE, 1(4) LONDON SCHOOL ECON. PUB. POL’Y REV. 7 (2021), http://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.25; in the Global South, see Nadje Al-Ali, Covid-19 and Feminism in the Global South: Challenges, Initiatives and Dilemmas, 27 EUR. J. WOMEN’S STUD. 333 (2020). 14 Amanuel Elias, Jehonathan Ban, Fethi Mansouri, & Yin Paradies, Racism and Nationalism During and Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic, 44(5) ETHNIC & RACIAL STUD. 783 (2021). 15 Kate Power, The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Increased the Care Burden of Women and Families, 16 SUSTAINABILITY: SCI., PRAC. & POL’Y 67 (2020). 16 See, for example, the closing of the Nepal-India border. See also Nimesh Dhungana, Human Dignity and Cross-border Migrants in the Era of the COVID-19 Pandemic, 136 WORLD DEV. 105174 (2020). 17 See, for example Gillian Triggs, We Can Secure Both Public Health and the Rights of Asylum Seekers to Protection, 32(2) INT’L J. REFUGEE L. 367 (2020); Nasar Meer, Emma Hill, Timothy Peace & Leslie Villegas, Rethinking Refuge in the Time of COVID-19, 44(5) ETHNIC & RACIAL STUD. 864 (2021). 18 ISI and ENS work. See, e.g. Tejal Khanna, Addressing COVID-ified Maritime Migration in the Bay of Bengal: The Case of Stateless Rohingya Boat People, 12(3) AUSTL. J. MAR. & OCEAN AFF. 181 (2020). 19 Andreea Cârstocea, Raul Carstocea & Craig Willis, The Impact of COVID-19 on Roma Communities in Non-EU Countries in Eastern Europe, ECMI MINORITIES BLOG (Oct. 5, 2020), https://www.ecmi.de/infochannel/detail/the-impact-of-covid-19on-roma-communities-in-non-eu-countries-in-eastern-europe. 20 For example, although widely used, including in the COVID-19 context, “vulnerability” is a contested and arguably political term insofar as it may also produce a sense of “othering” as individuals and groups are “vulnerabilized.” See Kate Brown, Kathryn Ecclestone, & Nick Emmel, The Many Faces of Vulnerability, 16 SOC. POL’Y & SOC’Y 497 (2017); Lindsay Larios & Stephanie Paterson, Fear of the Other: Vulnerabilization, Social Empathy, and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Canada, 15(2) CRITICAL POL’Y STUD. 137 (2021). 21 Intersectionality, OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY (2d ed. 1989). Above all, intersectionality is a theoretical and scholarly approach to cumulative inequalities pioneered by Kimberlé Crenshaw. 22 For an example of an intersectional approach to COVID-19, see Giorgia Donà Race, Immigration and Health: The Hostile Environment and Public Health Responses to Covid-19, 44(5) ETHNIC & RACIAL STUD. 906 (2021). 23 Brooke A. Ackerly, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Krishna Menon, Marysia Zalewski, & Meenakshi Gopinath, COVID-19: Shifting Paradigms, 22(4) INT’L FEMINIST J. POL. 453 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press