Covid-19 is among the deadliest pandemics the world has experienced in recent history. The African continent has, thus far, fared comparatively well with just under 150,000 confirmed infections and about 5,000 fatalities as of early June 2020. Even so, the heavy economic, social, and emotional toll of the pandemic on the continent is already clear, and some analysts estimate that the situation will worsen in the coming months. Given its underresourced health-care systems and lack of social safety nets, Africa’s best hope for mitigating the spread of Covid-19 lies in community-based prevention efforts. This will require very strong locally led campaigns of information dissemination, along with community mobilization and sensitization.
Starting with SSRC president Alondra Nelson’s reflections on “Society after Pandemic,” this series of essays explores the human, social, political, and ethical dimensions of Covid-19. These pieces call attention to how social research can shed light on the short- and long-term effects of the pandemic and what can be done to improve responses, both now and in the future.
The publication of this series would not be possible if not for the help of the following SSRC staff:
Juni Ahari, communications and editorial assistant.
Cole Edick, program associate, Anxieties of Democracy and Media & Democracy programs.
Carrie Hamilton, program assistant, Social Data Initiative and Media & Democracy program.
Saarah Jappie, program officer, Transregional Collaboratory on the Indian Ocean.
Michelle Lee, program assistant, International Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Line Sidonie Talla Mafotsing, communications and editorial assistant, African Peacebuilding Network and Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa.
Daniella Sarnoff, program director, International Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Catherine Weddig, program assistant, Social Data Initiative and Media & Democracy program.
Themes
Essays
Social Research and Insecurity
Emotions as the New Ethical Turn in Social Research
by Shobana Shankar
Writing for our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Shobana Shankar reflects on how the pandemic has thrown into question basic assumptions that emotions impede knowledge-creation and dissemination. She explores instead how we might consider how emotions and their manipulation are part of social norms, including norms of scholarly work; and how the disclosure of emotions that affect our perception and presentation of research, along with privilege and positionality, is the new ethical turn in a landscape of research insecurity.
Society after Pandemic
V is for Veracity
by Jenny Reardon
Jenny Reardon, in her contribution to the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, argues that the metaphors of war and battle in fighting Covid-19, now commonplace, can have their own problematic effects on how we imagine and act in the face of the pandemic. The “us vs. them” imagery that war metaphors promote pulls us away from veracity—“trustworthy truths” that foreground human (and nonhuman) relations and interdependencies. The pandemic provides an opportunity, Reardon argues, to mobilize veracity for a more just post–Covid-19 future.
Democracy and Pandemics
Voting in Crisis: The Likely Impact of Coronavirus on US Political Participation
by Jake Haselswerdt
In this “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” essay, Jake Haselswerdt asks how the Covid-19 pandemic will affect political participation, particularly voting, in the United States. Comparing the current pandemic to the financial and housing crisis of 2008—a year in which the United States held a high-turnout election—Haselswerdt debunks the notion that when Americans’ lives are disrupted by crisis, they are mobilized to turn out to vote against incumbents. Drawing on recent research about “personal crisis,” he finds that it can actually demobilize citizens as they divert their time and energy to more basic needs. Importantly, the specific constraints of a pandemic—from lockdowns to loss of life—are likely to have additional demobilizing effects.
Society after Pandemic
Using Social Science to Understand and Respond to Covid-19 in Jails and Prisons
by David C. Pyrooz, Ryan M. Labrecque, Jennifer J. Tostlebe and Bert Useem
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, jails and prisons have become particularly vulnerable to the spread of the novel coronavirus, putting millions of incarcerated people at risk. In this essay for the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, David C. Pyrooz, Ryan M. Labrecque, Jennifer J. Tostlebe, and Bert Useem draw on their research in Oregon facilities, and reflect on the complex issues of doing research with prisoners under pandemic conditions. They report on prisoners’ sense of safety given the health risks inside prisons and speak to efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus.
Pandemic, religion, and public life
Pandemics in the Post-Grid Imaginary
by Joanne Randa NuchoThe Covid-19 pandemic has forced a reckoning with the deep inequalities in the United States. Racism and poverty are life-and-death matters. But the virus also reveals what has long been unraveling in this country—a universal approach to the provision of public goods, infrastructures, and services. As an anthropologist who works on infrastructural politics in Lebanon and lives and teaches in California, I realize there are deep vulnerabilities that come with fragmented, patchwork approaches to the provision of essential services. Not only does the United States lack a public system that guarantees medical care, but there has been a lack of basic coordination between federal, state, and local jurisdictions.
Covid-19 in Africa
Coronized Lives in Response to Covid-19: Hopeful Lockdown or Haplessness?
by David Ngendo-TshimbaThe prolonged Covid-19 lockdown in Uganda is exacting a huge toll on the people’s resilience. Although the pandemic is global, it is experienced differentially in various countries and locales around the world. Preventive measures such as lockdowns have a long history as nonpharmaceutical interventions to blunt the force of extreme mortality events. However, there is much that is new about the present Covid-19 crisis.
Covid-19 in Africa
Covid-19 and Nigeria’s Counterinsurgency Operations in the Northeast
by Daniel Olisa IwezeThis article explores the impact of Covid-19, including the government’s response to the pandemic, on military counterinsurgency operations in northeast Nigeria. Prior to the pandemic, Nigeria’s counterinsurgency operation in the region had not been impressive despite a budgetary expenditure of over NGN 4 trillion allocated to the defense sector since 2009. The successes of the operations have been short lived despite the government’s claims that Boko Haram fighters have been “technically defeated.” The floundering counterinsurgency operations before and during the spread of Covid-19 to Nigeria could be attributed to a number of factors. These range from poor strategic planning and tactics, lack of weapons and logistics supplies, and delays in the payment of salaries. Others include poor welfare packages, allegations of corruption, and poor coordination of the security agencies involved in planning and executing military operations.
Democracy and Pandemics
The Pandemic and the Production of Solidarity
by Margaret Weir
In this contribution to our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Margaret Weir explores how social solidarity manifests across differing contexts. She makes three points of contrast between the United Kingdom and the United States: pre-existing healthcare institutions, economic stimulus strategies, and public leadership on racial and ethnic differences. Weir argues that these three areas explain why social solidarity has been maintained in the United Kingdom compared to the United States despite similar national attempts to confront the Covid-19 pandemic.
Social Research and Insecurity
Disturbing the Aesthetics of Power: Why Covid-19 Is Not an “Event” for Fieldwork-based Social Scientists
by Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka
Aymar Nyenyezi Bisoka, writing for our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, queries why Covid-19 has not become an “event” for Western social researchers: an accident that radically reverses the normal order of things. Instead, he demonstrates that the Black bodies of research assistants continue to carry the weight of a colonial system of knowledge production, rendering them vulnerable to dangerous conditions. How, Bisoka asks, might a decolonizing response change research practice—and how have African artistic productions helped to map this terrain?