COVID Studies

A “state of the field” collection of essays that presents the latest research on the pandemic from a range of disciplines

COVID Studies is a “state of the field” collection of essays that presents the latest research on the pandemic from a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, public policy, political science, history, and science and technology studies. Though varied in their methodologies, whether ethnography, data analysis, or archival research, the contributors together view COVID not as an isolated event with a discrete beginning and end, but rather as an ongoing crisis that resulted from and has shaped underlying social and political conditions.

As the essays demonstrate, COVID is a nested disaster: a deadly and debilitating virus 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. Taking COVID and its lessons out of the museum of past disasters, where powerful people and institutions want it to remain, this volume puts it right back into the middle of our lives, where it belongs for now, and surely for a very long time to come.

Although no longer formally acknowledged as a pandemic by global health officials, COVID nevertheless is a continuing disaster due to its toll on life, health, economy, safety, and justice. Examining the pandemic as a process that was shaped by longer histories of what came before it and that continues to make new realities in the present, the contributors suggest that we are still researching and writing from inside the disaster.