While the COVID-19 narrative of social responsibility has become widely accepted globally, the experience of this sentiment is highly differentiated.
Pandemic Insights
We would like to thank everyone for their contributions to Pandemic Insights. We are no longer taking submissions for this particular column, but welcome pitches for essays on topical issues and in response to our calls for proposals.
Pandemic Insights essays are not reviewed or developmentally edited and solely reflect the views of the author.
Pandemic or Syndemic?
The holistic nature of our discipline, which combines social and biological approaches in time and space, is challenging us to deeply explore a syndemic approach to study this pandemic and establish a stronger foundation that invites other disciplines to help us understand the multiple dimensions and lessons of all pandemics in human history.
Counting Invisible Populations
Given the unequal nature of life in global metropoles, populations often living in the shadows shine a hotter spotlight on urban inequality and the jaggedness of a neoliberal calculus that has scaled back even the most basic services during a time of crisis.
Ensuring Museums Remain Relevant
COVID-19 will be with us for a long time. We need new practices for maintaining relationships and making collections accessible.
Fieldwork from Afar
While we elevate and almost fetishize in-person, long-term fieldwork, celebrating the dangers overcome and the intrepid who persevere, this is not the only way to conduct research.
The Hum of the Hive
A common statement we hear in the media these days argues that after the coronavirus pandemic things will not be the same. As someone who has lived through two pandemics already, I think we will adapt and largely return to familiar patterns.
Rural to Urban and Back Again in Peru
In an odd reversal, it is currently the countryside that is sustaining immigrant life in the city. But is this an “odd reversal” after all?
Observing the Pandemic Today to Rebuild Tomorrow
The future is a foreign land, and right now it’s separated from us by a heavy fog. The only way to break through that fog is to look very closely at what surrounds us before it becomes too familiar, or before it changes again.
Teaching Capitalism in the Time of Corona
As we rushed into the new reality of Zoom meetings and video lectures, the course became a roadmap for examining the coronavirus crisis in light of the current neoliberal economic condition.
Heat and the Coronavirus
The heat of the planet can be seen as the pulse of our social condition. Can heat also be a mirror to look at our life in the wake of the social crisis created by the virus?