While many people, politicians, and policymakers seek to “move on” from COVID-19, scientists and survivors are still coming to know, and struggling to understand, its features and impacts. Origin stories double as foreign policy battles; denialism gives way to agnotology. But the social worlds that made the COVID-19 pandemic into the most resounding disaster of our times are well known to us; they are inheritances, and they have historical structure. Although it no longer drives our headlines, we suggest that we are still researching and writing from inside the disaster; not formally acknowledged as a pandemic anymore by global health officials, but nevertheless a disaster in its toll on life, health, economy, safety, and justice. In fact, COVID is a nested disaster, a deadly and debilitating virus, tucked inside of an infodemic, woven through traumatically inadequate health systems in the United States and around the world. COVID is also a compound disaster, entangled with climatic disasters of land, air, and sea, and grinding against the tragedies of migration, war, and political dysfunction. These modes of analysis take COVID and its lessons out of the museum of past disasters, where powerful people and institutions want it to remain, and put it right back into the middle of our lives, where it belongs for now, and surely for a very long time to come. The pandemic also quickly changed the ways many people lived their daily lives--a sense of history helps as we watch the disastrous become quotidian.
This roundtable brings together the history of medicine and disaster studies, connecting scholars eager to discuss the archival, methodological, and political problems posed by researching the the history of pandemics from inside a pandemic. While uniform in their commitments to historical knowledge as a necessary tool for survival in a disaster, the participants come from different scholarly traditions, with differential commitments and strategies for public engagement. The roundtable will allow these many perspectives to be heard, and audience members will actively participate in the conversation. Participants will include George Aumoithe, Jih-Fei Cheng, Gregg Gonsalves, Monica Green, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Jacob Steere-Williams, and Jacqueline Wernimont.
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning OutcomesThis roundtable will provide participants practical skills in understanding historiographical trends in the history of medicine and in disaster studies. Additionally it will allow participants to see history as an unfolding set of conflicts, resolved through the deployment of political power, expertise, and dispoute. Participants will appreciate the ways that medicine and society co-structure each other as dynamic spaces of human action. Lastly, participants will hear under-represented voices in history, and see the importance of full inclusivity in the formation of historical archives.
The Roosevelt Room is on the 2nd Floor of the Genesee Building.From the guest elevators on the Lobby Level: Turn left before reaching the main staircase. Continue left through the Genesee Building façade toward the Fitness Center. Take either the elevator or the spiral staircase to the 2nd Floor.The Roosevelt Room is located above the Citizens Banks Freestanding directional signs will be posted throughout the route.
