Introduction

Alexa S. Dietrich, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Rodrigo Ugarte

In the spring of 2025, SARS-CoV-2 remains a disorderly virus. 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 structure.

COVID Studies: A Reader is a collection of essays written by researchers who are tracking COVID as a process, shaped by histories, making new realities and new social structures. Although COVID 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, the 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. As this volume goes to press, we find ourselves in a new swirl of painfully relevant headlines: “Amid West Texas Measles Outbreak, Vaccine Resistance Hardens,”1 “NIH to Terminate or Limit Grants Related to Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake,”2 “National Science Foundation Cancels Research Grants Related to Misinformation and Disinformation,”3 and “NIH Reels with Fear, Uncertainty About Future of Scientific Research.”4

The global scale of this disaster is such—over seven million killed (as of April 2025) and the innumerable political ramifications—that it sometimes seems that the individual can be swept up in the storm of COVID as a historical force. The uncanniness of life in disaster, along with the blurring of reality it brings, raises the stakes for researchers to think about specific stories from specific people in local contexts. The authors collected in this volume do this type of work with great skill, and they inspire us. So, as we open by explaining this volume’s goals and methods, we also reflect on the location of COVID in space and time and how it has moved through our social fabric. We hope that readers will draw from the volume not only a sense of where we have been and where we are in the narrative present but also what the future holds in what Alondra Nelson has referred to as “Society After Pandemic.”5 The pandemic has indeed shown itself to be a “portal,” as described by author Arundhati Roy, and while we have undoubtedly “dragg[ed] the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas” forward with us into the present, the authors in this collection also point us toward ways to “imagine another world. And [be] ready to fight for it.”6

Understanding “Unnatural Disasters”

As news of an increasingly serious-sounding virus that would later be known as COVID-19 filtered into our awareness in late February 2020, the staff of the Social Science Research Council began talking about how they might respond as an institution. One idea that quickly gained traction was to curate an essay series in the vein of “Understanding Katrina,” a project that responded to specific events in which experienced social scientists used their previous work to draw attention to the deeper structural causes and impacts of a major disaster. It soon became apparent that the global and all-consuming nature of the pandemic suggested not one but several essay series. The goal, as with the “Understanding Katrina” series, was to bring social science knowledge to bear on what appeared to be, on the surface, a public health event but that our colleagues were already understanding to be a social process with an impact of historic proportions.

In being tasked with curating a series framed loosely as contributions from the field of disaster studies, we quickly realized that a core tension in recent years in the field was likewise core to our discussion—that disaster studies was a field of some depth and duration (as Kathleen Tierney notes, a good seventy years of research). And yet, climate change and other factors have augmented the pace, scope, and impact of disasters, bringing new researchers into the field almost daily as new disasters intersected with their existing research areas, both geographically and topically. Additionally, real-time contextualization projects—such as the COVIDCalls podcast—were emerging as fora for researchers to find one another and leverage new media tools to share their work (and their shared fears and hopes) in the moment.7 The merger of the Social Science Research Council essay series and the up-to-the-minute explorations of COVIDCalls rendered new collaborations. We decided that while giving due attention to the established, experienced researchers of disasters, we also wanted to create a big tent, inviting early-career scholars and those from across the social sciences and additional disciplines whom we thought would bring something important to a conversation about COVID through the lenses of disasters and public health emergencies.

This approach can be seen throughout the essays in this volume, beginning with Part I, “Making Sense in Disaster,” which deals with origins, insights, infrastructure, and definitions, building on previous disaster research. Other themes soon began to show themselves as important even as they were grounded in already emerging directions in disaster work. Part II, “Disasters Compounding,” was gaining traction as a concept recognizing when disaster events follow one another closely, as in the case of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico. The essays in Part II also provide a framework to better describe and understand how acute disaster events impact places with long-standing social and environmental inequality, and other harms, as when a hurricane hits communities already grappling with chronic pollution. COVID presents a novel set of compounding disaster occurrences, as the pandemic hit communities still rebuilding from the aftermath of hurricanes, communities managing long-term economic decline, groups that were grappling with other chronic diseases, and so on. COVID itself also created or contributed to its own compounding disasters within the pandemic, as it spawned new iterations of mis- and disinformation, colliding with politics on a massive scale and creating new environmental waste streams from the use of masks and increases in home delivery services.

The pandemic quickly changed the ways many people lived their daily lives. Even for those who were deemed essential workers and continued to work outside the home, the way they worked often changed, and their daily sense of exposure created great burdens of concern for them and their families. For those able to stay closer to home, new forms of care work suddenly took on new weight, caring for elderly parents, children, and even ourselves as we became devastatingly ill with no recourse and little information. Care work, long invisible, was now front and center for so many people and communities, ranging from the individual, the family, and the neighborhood to community-living settings. For many, the burdens continue to be misunderstood and underrecognized, forcing communities to create novel solutions for mutual aid and support. And yet, these solutions still require the investment of resources that are often lacking for communities of color, disabled people, women, the elderly, and Indigenous peoples.

Inequalities and Taking Care

The COVID-19 pandemic unmasked for the public at large many of the inequalities of the world. Often overlooked until disaster happens, we argue that disaster studies, a field with roots in Cold War military preparedness research and characterized by catastrophic weather events, is uniquely suited to understanding the multifaceted effects of the pandemic, both as it happened and long after it leaves the public’s short-term memory. The notion that disasters reveal fundamental truths about society is an old saw in anthropology and is not without its critics,8 but for the pandemic there were ways in which the notion held true—particularly as it revealed structural inequalities in the United States and globally.

As lockdowns wore on, many inequalities, social tensions, and structural violence occurrences ignored by the media and policymakers for years, indeed decades, began to spill over. Not everyone could both afford or be able to work from home during the pandemic. Many low-income workers either lost their jobs or had to continue working outside the home, potentially exposing themselves and their families to the virus. Similarly, those working certain professions had to remain on the “front lines,” as it was phrased, to prevent both supply lines and medical care from collapsing. Compounding these dynamics and worsening the spread of COVID, many governments were either slow to respond or stumbled out confusing messaging that exacerbated existing distrust in institutions. Information disorder and conspiracies—persistent societal disruptors—mutated and evolved alongside the virus, helped along by new forms of communication such as social media, creating further suspicions of institutional and scientific messaging. Through the internet, fake remedies, mask skepticism, and vaccine hesitancy spread.

COVID-19 also triggered a crisis of care, covered in Part III, “Taking Care.” Working from home included both teachers and children and meant having virtual classes from home. Families living in smaller homes shared spaces with parents or other relatives doing work. Parents had to ensure that their children paid attention in their Zoom classes while completing their own work. We dealt with the realities of family spread across different rooms to avoid being on top of each during the workday, and we saw colleagues struggle to wrangle their kids while we were in Zoom meetings. Of course, there have been many people who, even before the pandemic, had to balance caring for a loved one and their own lives. For them, the pandemic and the shutdowns simply made everything harder. News stories also would reveal how many care centers for the elderly struggled, leading to preventable deaths. Institutions and governments should also shoulder some of the blame for chronic issues with the regulation and support of these institutions in the middle of a predictable—and predicted—disaster.

Like many people around the world, we spent 2020 and then 2021, 2022, and 2023 trying to anticipate what would come next: When would the pandemic end? What would the “new normal” look like? Would there be “lessons learned,” as there always seem to be in disasters—even if those lessons are not well retained or not perfectly applicable the next time around? We were gratified to see the original group of essays finding its way into social media discourse and mainstream media, onto syllabi, and into the pages of the many academic projects already in the works across the humanities and the social sciences.

But it was becoming clear that yet another new set of COVID-influenced realities were emerging. The new ethical imperatives for researchers working at a distance and with global ambitions, memorialization-as-activism, disinformation and conspiracy theories, and long COVID were all squarely at the center of any good analysis of this disaster, and the authors in the original series (and others thinking in a similar vein) continued to develop insights that built on their original essays. Like all disasters, COVID drags along old realities and scripts new ones all at once, covered in Part IV: “Coping with COVID Realities.”

How to Use This Text

Looking at this collection of essays as we go to press, we note two particular aspects brought to life in this reader: (1) COVID has touched every aspect of existence, in every place in the world, and (2) the lived experience of COVID’s influence continues to evolve but has not yet disappeared. Readers looking beyond the four core themes under which we have grouped these essays may also find utility in exploring specific examples emphasizing inequality, interpersonal relationships, and examples that show the broad-scale political implications of the pandemic. While we believe that each individual essay is powerful on its own, we hope that teachers, students, and professional researchers alike will engage with essays as collectives, as grouped by us, or in your own novel arrangements. The essays are written by experts from around the globe, coming from many research backgrounds. And the essays have been curated over the course of several years, with most authors having benefited from feedback by the other authors in the collection—these pieces truly speak to one another and in a collective, if at times cacophonous, voice. They challenge disciplinary boundaries and push forward a new and inclusive approach to studying disasters, highlighting what is at once unique and ubiquitous about the COVID pandemic.

Notes

1. 1.  Fenit Nirappil and Elana Gordon, “Amid West Texas Measles Outbreak, Vaccine Resistance Hardens,” Washington Post, March 2, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/03/02/measles-outbreak-texas-vaccine-hesitancy-death/.
2. 2.  Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach, “NIH to Terminate or Limit Grants Related to Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake,” Washington Post, March 10, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/03/10/vaccines-nih-rfk-research-canceled/.
3. 3.  Sarah Scire, “National Science Foundation Cancels Research Grants Related to Misinformation and Disinformation,” NiemanLab, April 21, 2025, https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/04/national-science-foundation-cancels-research-grants-related-to-misinformation-and-disinformation/.
4. 4.  Carolyn Y. Johnson, “NIH Reels with Fear, Uncertainty About Future of Scientific Research,” Washington Post, March 5, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2025/03/05/nih-trump-turmoil-grants/.
5. 5.  Alondra Nelson, “Society After Pandemic,” Items: Insights from the Social Sciences, April 23, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/society-after-pandemic/.
6. 6.  Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca.
7. 7.  “What Is COVIDCalls? COVIDCalls Is on a Quest to Understand What the Pandemic Reveals About Americans,” http://covid-calls.com.
8. 8.  Roberto E. Barrios, “What Does Catastrophe Reveal for Whom? The Anthropology of Crises and Disasters at the Onset of the Anthropocene,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2017): 151–66, https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102116-041635.