"Intimate publics" and the trade-off between individual rights and collective responsibility

With protests happening around the world, everywhere from Canberra to Ottawa, most of them predicated on some unclear combination of anti-vaccination, anti-vaccination mandates, anti-media, anti-mainstream politics—with the odd infiltration of neo-Nazism, religious fundamentalism, and the like—there is much talk about what is driving these protests and what is the best way to respond.

Whatever way you look at them, I think, they represent a failure in the ways in which we have organised society, and it is reasonable to argue that although these protests have sprung up in relation to public health issues around the Covid-19 pandemic, they in fact represent something that has been building for a long time.

All the pictures with this article were taken by me at various anti-vax protests in Nice, in France, between September 2021 and January 2022

We are dealing with an age-old argument between individual rights and collective responsibility, and we can date its uptick to at least the rise of…