EPILOGUE
In COVID Times
This volume concludes with a conversation in progress, a reflection of the uncertainty each of the participants in this project feels over the establishment of an ending point for COVID-19. Indeed, by the time of publication, this conversation already reflects a distance in time and perspective, a gap from the world COVID made in 2023 to that of 2025 when the pandemic has apparently retreated and yet scaffolds so many aspects of politics and science. These COVID time lags, as the author Malka Older explains, are the inevitable distances between the pandemic as an event unfolding in one place and its many manifestations across incongruent times and many spaces around the globe. The conversation below was held in the summer of 2023 at a time when the participants were making sense of the pandemic in their lives, their work, and their institutions. The participants included George Aumoithe, Alexa S. Dietrich, Moon Jeong Choi, Kim Fortun, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Lori Peek.
Verb tense was a struggle. Are we talking about events in the past yet? Surely not, but to talk about the disaster as ongoing requires new analytical tools. The discussion ultimately focused on issues around trust in experts and the erosion of that trust during the pandemic, and since all present are in the academic workforce, we naturally considered our own institutions as sites of conflict and reform. Compound disasters and disaster justice also emerged as major discussion points, as did the ways the pandemic altered research methods and outcomes. All agreed that the pandemic has and will continue to change society, the work we do to understand it, and our efforts to reform it in light of what we know. The conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.
Scott Gabriel Knowles (SGK): Hello friends. Thanks for joining these discussions. I would like to begin by asking Lori Peek a question. Lori, could you give us some big picture understanding of what has changed in the disaster research world since the pandemic started?
Lori Peek (LP): One thing that the pandemic has obviously done is opened up a field that has long focused on natural hazards, technological accidents, and willful acts of violence. I remember at the beginning of the pandemic, which in some ways feels like such a lifetime ago, people saying, “This is a pandemic. Should it be considered a natural hazard?” Where does it fall in that classic natural/technological/terrorism trifecta that oftentimes informs our field? The pandemic has been so profound, we might consider work in this vein as a fourth pillar of disaster research now.
The pandemic also further revealed the structured inequalities that keep us from acting on the research lessons. I think that is one of the most enduring and important findings on the social science side of hazards and disaster research: looking at the social roots of risk and how institutions and organizations do or do not help us to move forward in terms of promoting mitigation and preparedness and adaptation. In light of the depth of the damage done in this pandemic, it has only further deepened existing inequalities. Here, in the United States right now, it’s just climate disaster on top of climate disaster on top of climate disaster. This is all being layered upon a society that is not even close to recovered from the pandemic. I think among many people there’s a sense of “The pandemic is over, the emergency state has been relaxed, and we’re not wearing masks; we’re not required to take these precautions anymore.” But of course, those of us who are paying attention, we know there is no end to the damage that has been done. There’s no bringing back the caregivers that have died during this pandemic for the tens of thousands of children who now don’t have a living parent or grandparent. The alarm bells, they’re ringing about the levels of education that have been lost.
Let me offer a brief story from the 2023 Natural Hazards Workshop. One of our plenary sessions featured four big-city emergency managers. These emergency managers really have their feet to the fire in every way. And so they started their plenary session, and their moderator asked, “What hazards are you thinking about?” What were they talking about? Homelessness. The drug epidemic. Infrastructure collapse. Water toxicity. The migrant crisis. The list went on and on. One of the emergency managers, from one of the most earthquake-prone cities in the United States, didn’t even name earthquake as a concern until number seven on her list! The emergency manager from Denver said, “I no longer think of myself as an emergency manager. I think of myself as a humanitarian responder.” And so, I think that really gets at the nexus of those social, political, ecological disasters, with the traditional natural hazards and the pandemic overlaying all of it.
George Aumoithe (GA): This isn’t surprising to me in the context of what Black people in the United States have had to deal with when it comes to exposure to risk. Since W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro, social scientists have understood how exposure to risk is linked to casual disregard in the health care profession, for example. With regard to how Black women and people expecting children engage with physicians, there’s ample evidence of bad treatment that doesn’t necessarily require meta-analysis. People who see socially differential experiences in the health care system as a surprise, I find, are often those who aren’t in communities exposed to risk. If you take a social science view of a community that has been exposed to risk, it seems like just another data point among many other anecdotal data points for a particular individual, their family, and their community. But as you expand that scale, that sort of repetition stitches itself into its own sort of epistemology, a way to recognize and analyze disaster. It also becomes an ontology, a way or being whereby we understand that we are experiencing or present in a disaster.
SGK: Moon, how did some of the issues that Lori and George are raising manifest themselves in South Korea?
Moon Jeong Choi (MJC): My background is in social work, public health, and gerontology. I have observed a clear research focus on COVID-19 and its impact on inequality, amplifying inequality. Before the pandemic I traveled internationally probably like once every month or every other month, and I had a lot of international activities. In South Korean academia we have pressure to be globalized. But during the pandemic I had limited access to international discussions, and there were so, so many things going on in local communities. I think it made me more interested in domestic issues. I am a gerontologist. I study aging populations, and that population is the social group most affected by COVID-19. It made me think a lot about the inequality issue and the uneven distribution of risk and also government’s role in regulation. I had a grant for three years to study older drivers in South Korea, using some advanced technologies. I planned to do some data collection and interviews with the older drivers, but we could not reach those people because of COVID health regulations. So, we had to stop the study for a year and a half. I’ve never read so many articles as I did during the pandemic.
Our lab at KAIST is called the Aging and Technology Policy Lab, and we focus on digital divides. Older people who have never learned how to use digital devices when they were in school or work have to learn how to use them. There were some issues before COVID-19. For example, at McDonald’s and Burger King you have a kiosk, and when you order food, you have to know how to use a touchscreen. So, some older people cannot order a hamburger—but it’s okay not to eat a burger. During the pandemic, though, there was a “contactless” digital transformation in South Korea. Private business owners hesitated to hire workers, so they started to use a lot of these devices, replacing the labor force and making it harder to access basic things such as online shopping. So, when you want to buy something you have to know how to order through the website or on a mobile phone, but it’s not an easy thing for an older person. That research topic has become the center of our lab.
South Korea is somewhere between Europe and the United States when it comes to government regulation. We have national health insurance. It’s very interesting to see that during the pandemic, the government issued the regulation that everybody has to get vaccinated. Many people don’t trust the government, and there are ethical issues about personal choice versus public health that arose. In the United States it’s the same, but it has become more political there. South Korea was very aggressive about responding to COVID and has one of the lowest percentages of victims because of that regulation. But still, there are pros and cons.
SGK: It’s my observation that sometimes disaster events do change the structure of government in such a way that it also changes the structure of research funding. This is true around the world and definitely in the United States. September 11 was the ultimate example of that but even Hurricane Katrina as well. Lori, do you think COVID is going to function like that? Will we see more funding for pandemic research in the context of disaster research more broadly? I’m not sure I see the kinds of structural changes to government coming in this endemicity period of the COVID pandemic that I saw after September 11. I’m worried that if those structures of government are not changing, then I’m not sure the research structures are going to change.
LP: Absolutely. And dare we ask anything more than where is the COVID Commission. We had the 9/11 Commission and the Katrina panels. Where is the COVID Commission? I just don’t see that sort of large-scale reflection, that pause to take stock today for accountability, ownership of what went wrong and what went right. It’s like “Oh, we all got sick with COVID. It’s like a part of us, we’re moving on, door shut, emergency over.” Personally, I don’t know that there is going to be large-scale institutional change.
SGK: Let’s talk more about faith in institutions and why it seemed to unravel so dramatically as the pandemic went on. For me, as a historian of emergency management institutions, I’m not surprised by the ways that they fail and the ways that they talk about failure. But I was surprised by the very rapid erosion of trust in experts.
GA: As a junior scholar, I had one of my last two interviews finding a tenure track job in March 2020. I gave a teaching demo where we were processing the just-announced pandemic, and I thought how do we even create a lesson plan about this? I was compelled as a historian of public health to do so. But I remember distinctly we weren’t masking in the classroom. We were talking about fomite transmission rather than aerosol droplets. A student said we need to wear masks to protect ourselves, and I was parroting the guidance that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] had offered us that masks were unnecessary. I reflect on that moment now, and I think about how high trust in institutions was at that time. And then we saw clear neglect, abandonment, and misinformation from the government itself revealed during the early effort to preserve personal protective equipment and masks and to prevent panicked hoarding in the market by people protecting themselves.
Also, I assumed that there was an underlying public health rationality. There was some resistance to vaccination campaigns and resistance to quarantine, for example, but I assumed overall that people believed in public health institutions and wanted to follow their guidance. But people refused vaccination, refused to mask, and refused social distancing very early on in the pandemic, sometimes in ways that the media failed to cover, because it was so focused on an official narrative of people recognizing collectively that this was an emergency. In reality, a good 20, 30, 40 percent of people did not see it that way. These early events humbled my sense that you could even write about an epidemic in a unified voice or at least from some sort of viewpoint of rationality.
Kim Fortun (KF): I wasn’t surprised by the erosion of trust. But I can still feel the extraordinary sense of failure I felt as an educator.
It became very binary. You believe everything on Fox News or everything the CDC says. We don’t want people just doing what they’re told. But we need to better prepare people to sense-make. It’s not surprising that we’ve got an incredible divergence of recommendations—and you’ve got corporate messaging going on. The Right gets it better than everybody else. It’s literally in our educational systems. We’re creating the conditions for the kind of alienation that led to the extraordinary dysfunction that we’ve seen.
It is one of the tragedies of the COVID pandemic that we haven’t come out of it with a greater sense of investment in education and research. Almost to the contrary, there is an ugly cynicism about it, at least cynicism about expertise. In some ways, haven’t we awakened in a post-McCarthy 1955 and said, “Oh, wow, we’ve just passed through this real crisis of speech. Let’s seize this moment to actually double down on unpopular research and on allowing people who are immersed in making sense of a disaster, enabling them to do this work and speak freely and protect their jobs.” Some of the most important work done in the last three years was done in places like public health schools, medical schools, and law schools where many people didn’t have tenure protections, where people, including George, said, “We’re doing this. I’m going to talk to the reporters that want to talk. I’m going to go on TV.” And if somebody calls the provost or calls the trustees and says, “Hey, you’ve got some faculty member out here telling us that the pandemic is actually about race? Can you get this guy fired?” And you did it anyway. I’m going to try to remain optimistic here for a second. Can we still marshal the lessons of the pandemic to demand better from our institutions of knowledge making? I mean, George, is it possible?
GA: It’s possible. Is it probable? I don’t know. There was an intense push labor-wise on the part of at least residential universities to get back to in-person instruction. Anything that stood in the way of that, in the way of revenues, was a threat—including things like hybrid teaching or remote learning as well as masking. I also want to zoom back a little bit and also name some other pieces about the seniority system in academia. What counts for tenure? Op-eds do not count. Typically, public engagement does not count for tenure. I had lots of informal conversations with colleagues who chose not to do that type of engagement, particularly women dealing with extra childcare and other types of labor at home. And we all had to deal with this transition to teaching online; it was just too much to expect a public scholarship stance from those scholars. I think another thing that we should also explicitly name is the grant-making structure. Whenever there’s a turn toward funding community-based research, it is at best tokenistic and at worst nonexistent. There’s no sort of standard for the study group to rank a grant application based on its level of community engagement still to this day, which I think would surprise a lot of people. And if there is, it is seen as a service component that should not have any sort of FTE [full-time equivalent] attached to it. As a result, that has a racialized and gendered aspect as well. Black, Indigenous, women, and queer scholars disproportionately tend to do that kind of work because it is foundational to their method and research questions. But grant makers who are looking for “return” on investment, even though they won’t use that term, don’t see advantages in ranking proposals that do that kind of work.
KF: I want to just applaud you, George, for pointing out the political economy of it. I mean, it’s really not going to be enough for people to “care more.” We’ve got a fight ahead of us. We think the labor movement, they have to organize, and the civil rights movement has to organize, but we don’t talk about academic organizing. It’s like, somehow our institutions are supposed to just be a place for us to work. There are going to be a lot of setbacks, just like there are in any movement. When you lose in a political movement, you don’t say, “Well, that was a dumb thing to try.” You pop back up and get back out there. I think that academics need to get more serious about our institutions and build toward the things George just named.
SGK: I want to bring Alexa Dietrich into the conversation. Alexa was my continual discussion partner throughout the pandemic—we started out by working together to curate the essays that became the original “Disaster Studies” essays for the Social Science Research Council, with great editing help from Rodrigo Ugarte. As the pandemic changed, our discussions changed too, and so did the types of essays we commissioned—topics like vaccine politics and bereavement we probably could have seen coming. But for me, I wasn’t yet thinking seriously in 2020 about topics like disinformation or research methodology and ethical challenges for researchers in the pandemic.
Alexa, let’s pick up with that problem. How did researchers adapt to “life under lockdown,” and which of those adaptations might stick? I’m particularly interested in some of the ethical implications of remote or digital ethnography. Was this a skill-building time for anthropologists or for people (like me) who pretend to be anthropologists and use some anthropological methods in their work?
Alexa S. Dietrich (ASD): I don’t claim to be a full knowledge keeper of anthropology in this sense, but I have a few thoughts about it, one of which is that the field of anthropology—and this applies to all social sciences—has attempted to hold itself to a particular kind of scholarly standard that it also doesn’t necessarily meet. So, anthropologists are very hard on themselves and are also equally as likely as anybody else to make mistakes. Let’s take folks who were using digital methods who had spent a lot of time thinking about these methods. They were thinking about questions of consent: What does consent mean in the digital context? How do we build rapport in a digital context? We should view consent as not just like a one-and-done on a piece of paper. But it’s an ongoing process, right? And part of that means not just a researcher asking an interviewee, “Are you okay to keep going with the interview? You seem uncomfortable.” It means more, like actually paying attention to things like body language, because there’s a concern that the researcher can sit in a position of authority that is supported by an institutional position, the power of the university. There can be a concern that an interviewee may feel compelled to keep being involved in the research even if they’re uncomfortable with it. And so we wonder, how do you keep that rapport and that sort of sense of connection going that can allow you to be thoughtful and to gain that ongoing consent of participation throughout the course of a longer-term study?
I was also thinking about accountability. Accountability is desperately needed in this disaster. In a crisis we are often of the mindset that “Well, we just have to react.” But now we’re just reacting all the time. You know, we do it as human beings. We do it as researchers, and it makes accountability very hard. And so I think it’s an important thing for researchers to remember that just because we’re in crisis or responding to or researching a crisis, it doesn’t mean that our need for accountability is not as high—or higher—than it is at any other time. And that’s true for every institution.
GA: I think these questions and insights are bubbling up now. Social science obviously has been structured to use interviews, participant-observer research, and other forms of concretizing social experiences as evidence. But there are certain shortcuts that communities exposed to risk can already take cognitively because of prior experience or anecdotal experience within one’s own family or community. And I think now the profession is experiencing its own sort of cultural humility that many medical doctors have been encouraged to adopt. You know, at the encouragement of anthropologists, for example, I think that sort of reflexive lens is now being turned on multiple professions and social scientific traditions because we’re engaged with something that’s so long and ongoing in the present. A lot of people assumed, you know, COVID would be gone in a month, three months, six months, a year, two years. And now we see that it’s with us. So that experience in the present, I think, humbles us all when we do any type of work that looks at the past and tries to connect the past to the present.
SGK: Kim, well before the pandemic you were a leader in the kind of disaster research that you do—bringing people into collaborative research and discussion remotely. I remember thinking in March of 2020 when everybody was declaring, “We’re turning to Zoom, we’re turning to remote! How will we possibly survive?” I said, “I know a mentor. I know somebody who’s been convening people all over the world in environmental justice research and activism, and she doesn’t think that it’s second-class research.” I know you’re not the kind of person to say, “Hey, the world finally caught up to me.” But I do think maybe you could just reflect for a second about the turn to a sort of “distance ethnography.”
KF: It was driven by a practical sense that I wanted to collaborate with people across a wide geography. And so it meant doing it virtually. I often think that kaleidoscopic acts are our best chance at doing something. My early virtual work was just to sustain transnational collaborations. Usually, it’s me on the phone or computer at 6:00 a.m. That’s what works the whole world over. But then I’ve also really experimented with it in teaching as a matter of accessibility. I love to meet my students in the classroom. But the fact is, it’s hard for some students to get there. I’ve tried hybrid, and sometimes it means asynchronous learning. But I guess I’m just not a purist at all about virtuality being worse that being together in person. It’s like, step up, we have to think and educate together, whatever our conditions.
SGK: We are many different types of researchers in this conversation, trained in different traditions. What you’ve described, Kim, is perhaps most disruptive for anthropologists and for historians like myself. For anthropology—and please excuse this generalization—the real knowledge is traditionally supposed to be made in the field, out in the field, physically at distance, right? As in, I have got to physically move my body to another place to actually make new knowledge. I think for historians, certainly of my generation and older, we were raised in a tradition that said, “You should only do research in a place that’s poorly lit and poorly ventilated; it is called an archive.” And anything else you do is just preparing you to go into the archive, into the cathedral. We didn’t have that luxury—or maybe call it a duty—during the pandemic. I actually think that’s an important shake-up to the really badly ossified traditions of historical research. We discovered troves of materials that were already accessible to us in digital formats. We modified our methods to become more engaged in the translation of historical findings into contemporary debates. The stress on archives and libraries to digitize source materials with dwindling resources in the midst of a pandemic is a very serious concern and one that historians can and I think generally do take very seriously. Solidarity with the archivists!
GA: I just want to share another bullet point for the junior scholars dealing with closed archives. Closure pushed historians to be creative in a way that anthropologists have long been creative in terms of interview method. Many historians who want to do interviews or oral history have always understood that something like Skype existed. It’s not a new technology. But was there a cultural norm of signing in and talking to someone through a camera? I don’t think so. And that was a very big barrier that existed before the pandemic that really fell. In the pandemic, particularly for older interview subjects, it was actually the safest way for them to interact with their families. So, they had the technology installed; there was maybe an urgency, a morbid urgency in the face of collective mortality to get their words on the record and to share their experience and knowledge. I’m optimistic that that practice has thoroughly shifted and the barrier to telecommunications in historical research is no longer really there. Most people know how to use it, and if it’s not Zoom then some other format. Even if it’s not video, there’s much more of a comfortable stance toward, for example, phone-based interview or asynchronous interviewing. All of these things are very, very positive.
KF: I’d like to take what George said a step further and say that I think it’s really expanded what counts as data in many fields but particularly in fields of qualitative analysis, and for the good. It’s bringing up questions like “What’s a dataset?” If you can’t go to the field, can you learn to borrow data and reuse data? It takes a completely different kind of eye and creativity to use someone else’s interview. But it can deepen our analysis and allow us not to return to the same communities that are already overresearched. It’s raised a lot of challenges but of the sort that we should be taking on. I also want to say that George is incredibly insightful about the system that we are situated and working within. I do think that it’s scholars of your generation who have been through the wringer. And it’s given you incredible perspective. And Scott, I like the way that you’ve persistently called us together over the last couple of years to have these types of discussions on COVIDCalls. It’s creating an archive of a kind of second-order reflection on our practice that I think lays the ground for future work. So, thank you, both of you.
ASD: Another consideration with the pandemic is that as technology can create connection, it can also exacerbate inequality. In anthropology we talk about these different kinds of collaborative methods—the patchwork anthropology. We can be creative; we can build a sort of research collage. But at the same time I think what we also saw, and this was a great concern of mine as a SSRC program director, how this approach actually exacerbates inequalities in research collaborations, particularly between Global North and Global South collaborators. We already often have circumstances in which the folks in the Global North are getting most of the money, right? They’re getting most of the prestige. And they’re treating colleagues of theirs in the Global South who have equal degrees, who are PhD-level researchers, essentially as research assistants. So you gather the data, and I analyze it from my ivory tower in the Global North. This exposes the role that technology can play in the growth of inequalities, even among researchers themselves.
The pandemic accelerated our reliance on technology and the idea that technology could kind of be a solution for so many things. It’s a medium we’re talking on right now. The pandemic accelerated our use of Zoom and Teams and Streamyard, all these different platforms for speaking across continents as well as with people just around the corner. It became supernormal. Technology becomes a substitution, a way of solving problems. And I think that sort of techno solutionism, which we talk a lot about in disaster studies, has loomed large over a lot of our conversations. To Moon’s point, the digital divide was already an issue not only for aging populations but also between countries in different parts of the world. There were so many ways in which that form of inequality was already something of a concern, and then we had the pandemic come along. Not only in terms of things related to COVID, so you have telemedicine, for example, but also digital tracking. Now your phone is going to tell you that you’re exposed to COVID. Now we are living with many more of those technologies, like wearable digital trackers. We accepted many of those technologies quite suddenly, faster than we might have otherwise. And still at the same time, we’re left with this digital divide, right? Because there is a group of people who are doing the adopting and a group of people who are still maybe less able to for lots of different reasons or financially they don’t have access.
GA: With regard to accessibility, there was this whole kind of euphemism of “the Zoom university.” We had, for the first time, the ability to collaborate across institutions and see other work that formerly might have been held in the seminar but not broadcast. Sadly, I think a lot of that has diminished. But I think enough institutions and scholars like Kim have continued that as a methodology of convening scholars. In my Global Health and Health Inequality Mapping Lab, I worked with a computer science master’s student who was based in India when the Delta wave was wrecking that country. We were able to collaborate using online cloud-based technologies like ArcGIS, Zoom, and Google Documents to cobble together a virtual lab. And yeah, there were time zone issues, but that paled in comparison to the advantages of being able to work with an international team and to have international expertise that didn’t necessarily need everyone to be in one physical location. I think people don’t want to go back to the world where you had to just work with your department or classroom students or only in one location. I think people don’t want to go back and can no longer go back to a world where new virtual labs and transnational collaborations have virtual infrastructure that institutions can’t intermediate as easily as they would, for example, in providing physical room for a lab. These changes are promising and leave me with a lot of optimism for the future of not just COVID studies but any sort of comparative or transnational work that requires expertise on a global scale. These are advantages that no scholar really wants to give up on even as archives reopen.
SGK: We are almost up on time, but I want to leave time to talk through one of the main themes of the book, and that has to do with the ethics of care and the care labor paradigm that, to me at least, has emerged from the pandemic as an absolutely vital convergence space for disaster research. George, could I ask you to start on this one?
GA: I love this question, and I was thinking about this question in advance of our meeting. One of the themes of the book is care work, including the politics, history, sociology, and anthropology of care work. We have moved beyond the caricature of care work as a touchy-feely research subject. It is attracting a new type of seriousness that social workers have always had toward the practice.
I was actually thinking about the phenomenon in the pandemic of pay differences between traveling nurses and staff nurses, and I found some interesting statistics. In 2018, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] found that staff registered nurses made on average $72,000. But traveling nurses could make as much as $100,000. So, that’s 2018. Then I looked up what happened in the pandemic. At the peak in January 2022, the pay differential between traveling nurses and staff nurses was 148 percent. And for the whole year it was 100 percent. So, you can make 100 percent more than a staff nurse being a traveling nurse. This is an astounding difference! We see among hospital administrators increasing reports, at the time, of budgetary pressures, near bankruptcy, just on the labor costs alone, associated with too few nurses. So, it raises questions, highlighting a place where care work meets labor history and labor studies. What are the consequences of that pay and labor distortion to the stability of our health care systems, especially when it becomes so difficult to staff a hospital and so attractive for a traveling nurse to float between hospitals for more money? How persistent is that distortion in terms of the distribution of care workers? And what does that mean for the future of the way in which we organize access to health care if it remains privatized and commodified? What does that portend for more cost-effective and equitable care in the United States alone, knowing that it’s an outlier in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]?
The pandemic revealed continuities but also in its distortions of the market has left us all with various points in the system to study in terms of that exceptionality. We can use our informed educated guesses to begin to step toward research questions that allow us to connect what seems to be an exceptional distortion and to critique the underlying system causing that distortion.
SGK: That is a powerful example of the kind of thing that I was hoping we would talk about—that should be right at the center of where disaster research is going. Thinking back to those big-city emergency managers Lori mentioned at the top of our discussion, they see these types of labor distortions for what they are: hazards to the life of their communities in disaster.
Incidentally, I talked with some brilliant and very tired nurses on COVIDCalls, one in particular named Cassie Alexander who wrote a wrenchingly honest book titled Year of the Nurse. She described being in the building for that experience you talked about, George, having these traveling nurses coming into their hospital and the pressures this placed on a unionized hospital operating under some sort of pandemic “state of exception.” There were really strong pressures, almost to the breaking point, for the unit cohesion inside the care workforce. Nurses showed up who had literally been riding the circuit of COVID case spikes, following these around the nation and earning the money that you described. Most nurses did not have the ability to do that. In other words, they had children at home, they had other care work that they needed to be doing—and yet, this was also probably true for some of the traveling nurses too, the money provided the incentive. The money was so good that they couldn’t not do it. And so the disaster creates this completely upside-down care environment. George, you’ve actually set it out in a very analytically tantalizing way—there’s lots of pieces we can grab from this and get to work on right away. So, Kim, let me come to you. Care as a space for interdisciplinary analysis: What are you seeing in this moment in the pandemic along these lines?
KF: It’s interdisciplinary, and yet we haven’t moved with that knowledge into either better analyses or better institutions and practices. A really simple example that I encounter all the time is the way the public health/health equity world doesn’t cross with the environmental world, even though the definition of environmental injustice is the coproduction of those two things. Working at the community level, I’ve seen very limited dialogue. We’re not able to characterize places, which is what George described. Talk about undercutting place-based knowledge when you’re pushing people into these traveling nursing circuits. The challenge is to understand places well enough, both locally and in terms of bigger structures, in a way that we can imagine the system changing.
I think of it as focusing on system dynamics. The beautiful thing about the example you just gave is that it’s a classic, zoomed-out intellectual analysis of the system. It points to a pressure point in the system: change the salaries of staff nurses. We need to both understand and characterize the problems but also to have translational capacity. And yet, it’s also excruciatingly unique in different situations, and there is the need for lots of scholars to be able to do that dance between pattern and variation. So again, it does lead me back to needing to build academic capacity so that we can do this kind of analysis to respond to the kind of compounding disasters that COVID made so visible.
SGK: I hear you, Kim, but it just seems like too much to do. I’m far from being as important or overworked as a nurse, but I’m tired from these past four years. Exhaustion and fatigue for researchers is real too, and that’s at every career level—especially those without job security. Where do you folks get your energy? How do you sustain your creativity?
MJC: The beauty of working as a professor is the intellectual freedom. I can choose what I want to study. We are like the vitamin in the body system, which is small, but if you don’t have it, you’re not sustainable. I think we are the kind of people who help make society sustainable. And also because we work with vulnerable populations, we are the people who raise their voices too. So, I think for me that that’s the fundamental motivation. And also recently, I’ve never had so many doctoral students. It is such a joy to see their intellectual growth.
SGK: Lori, do you feel like the vitamin in the large, often very dispiriting world of research funding and uptake? I love that metaphor. I’m going to credit Moon for that, but I’m going to use it for sure.
LP: I love it. And I’m loving that the discussion is now bringing in this care connection and thinking about the future care workforce and disaster research workforce. I want to share one thing that I did in the fall of 2022. I teach our big four hundred–student Intro to Sociology class. And I taught it in person in the fall of 2019. And then everything happened with the pandemic and I began teaching this large class online, which was quite an experience. In the fall of 2022, I came back into the classroom. I was so inspired to be with those young people who had just lived through such a historic event. Long-standing findings of disaster research tell us that oftentimes survivors need to hear from each other to realize that they’re not alone. So, I really approached my class as survivors. I feel so heartbroken for young people right now. This was one of our findings from studying children after Hurricane Katrina, that for young people it was that they missed their high school prom, that they missed all these kinds of key marker moments of childhood—it really hurt them. I was so acutely aware of that when I reentered the classroom.
When I prepared to teach the Intro class again, I thought the best way to learn sociology is to do sociology. So, we did a “pandemic diaries project.” I wanted the students to learn social science methods. I had them do ethics and methods training. They all had to collect one interview, and one interview only, with their colleagues. But then they had to analyze five of the interview transcripts. They were doing a little minipaper working with data, gathering data. After the class, the students said they learned so much, not just about sociology but also about themselves and about each other. During the pandemic a lot of people talked about mental health, but they also talked about how they’re stronger than they thought we were. It was just this reminder of how much we need space to reflect and to learn from each other. This is so important right now—if it’s not going to come from the top down, if there’s not ever going to be a COVID commission, then what is our responsibility to one another right now? What is our responsibility? What can we do with what we have to try to make a difference and to not let this moment fade away? To not let the pandemic just be one more thing on our checklist of all of the compound disasters that we are facing? What can we do to memorialize this, to honor the loss that has happened but also to try to not let go? How can we come out of this better and stronger? I feel the fatigue and exhaustion that set in, and rightfully so. It was just like all of the hope sort of dissipated for so many.
I think we are in this special position as disaster researchers, and there are unique attributes of this event that demand our attention. I’m just so proud of the members of our community, like Disaster Researchers for Justice, who are trying to do something different and to raise their voices in different places. So yes, Moon, that is absolutely my vitamin. That is what keeps me going every day, because if nothing else, disaster researchers may be getting burned out too, but they’re also realizing that this is the moment when we are needed. And we are really trying to do new and innovative things with our knowledge against what sometimes can feel close to insurmountable odds.