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The article highlights the politics of the Covid-19 vaccination drive in Zimbabwe. It interrogates questions of individual agency and institutional power in the administration of the vaccine. It is framed within Foucauldian scholarship, particularly that concerning the role of biopower, subjects and governmentality in the politics of vaccination. The article uses virtual ethnography to understand the politics of vaccination and contends that the vaccination drive highlights how power is played out within the Zimbabwean context. Individuals perceive their agency as constrained through explicit and implicit coercion, since vaccination is exercised through a form of governmentality that uses biopower. The article argues that the vaccination initiative presents a new form of governmentality that is premised on policing individual agency by other individuals as opposed to the dominant notions of governmentality that are shaped by political institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contends that the covid-19 pandemic has reconfigured how cities manage urban marginality within Zimbabwe. The pandemic enabled cities to push everyday mundane practices away from the centre of the city to the margins of the cities through securitisation and criminalising informal activities within the centre. The paper's methodological underpinnings are hinged on a six month ethnography within Bulawayo (Zimbabwe's second largest city). The paper maintains the view that managing urban marginality in the context of covid-19 must be framed within the binary of two opposing forces – governing institutions (the government and municipality) and the low-income residents. Using covid-19 as a pretext of "curbing the pandemic" governing institutions have pushed informal economic activities from the centre through employing law and force; on the other hand low-income residents have found eclectic means to counteract the measures imposed to constrain their agency. Finally, the paper suggests that covid-19 has reconfigured how cities manage urban marginality through pushing everyday informal practices to the periphery and how the low-income residents deploy their agency to counteract confinement hence managing urban marginality can be understood as a two-way process involving governing institutions and the low-income residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]