Face Shield Nation is a contemporaneous account of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, from the perspective of physician, medical anthropologist, and columnist Gideon Lasco. Drawing from his professional backgrounds in medicine and the social sciences, his critical scholarship, and his own lived experience of the lockdown, this book is addressed to future generations as well as our present one, for whom the memory of the pandemic, even today, is quickly fading. By “face shield nation,” Lasco calls attention to the uniqueness of the Philippine experience of a global phenomenon, as well as the materiality and corporeality of the country’s pandemic policies. Indeed, nationhood is at stake in living through, looking back to, and learning from the pandemic.
Published in 2024