Covid-19 and the Social Sciences

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.
April 25, 2020
Category

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

Covid-19 in East Asia

In these essays, scholars examine how East Asian countries responded to the Covid-19 crisis, analyzing the pandemic’s impact from international relationships to domestic affairs.

Mediated Crisis

Perhaps at a scale unseen before, the Covid-19 pandemic is experienced, managed, and coped with through a range of mediated experiences, positive and negative. This essay series examines the Covid-19 pandemic as part of a transition toward fully mediated moments of crisis.

Policy Models in Pandemic

These essays examine the use of policy modeling in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and how these methodologies may impact future decision making by both the public, experts, and policymakers.

Disaster Studies

This series of essays, drawing on insights from research on disasters and public health crises, will highlight how social research can shed light on the mutual effects of social inequality and events such as the Covid-19 pandemic over time.

Democracy and Pandemics

How is Covid-19 impacting democratic governance? What does the current crisis tell us about democratic strengths and weaknesses under states of emergency?

Social Research and Insecurity

How has the pandemic changed research practice? What security and ethical concerns might be generated by remote research and transregional collaborations in insecure contexts?

Covid-19 in Africa

This series brings together the research and reflections of fellows of SSRC’s Africa programs, scholars, practitioners, and activists on the nature, impacts and responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa, including its local-global connections.

Society after Pandemic

Scholars reflect on the wide-ranging effects of the pandemic in all corners of society, and consider what might come after.

Pandemic, religion, and public life

This series draws together scholars across the social sciences and the humanities to address various questions raised or renewed by Covid-19, and its effects on religious and public life globally.

A Time Capsule for Future Social Researchers

Inspired by the Council’s Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology, we ask prominent scholars to select a visual artifact of this time that will help future researchers understand the Covid-19 crisis.

Essays

Reflections on Assessment Models

by

Testing and models, medical and educational, have come under scrutiny during the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the conversation on the challenges of educational testing. Here, William Dardick looks at the reliability, validity, and fairness of educational assessments, and how these varied characteristics all factor into how policymakers employ testing and their results.

Read more
August 27, 2020

Too Sad to Vote? Mental Health’s Impact on Political Participation during the Covid-19 Crisis

by , and

Claudia Landwehr, Christopher Ojeda, and Oliver Tüscher ask how the effects on mental health from the Covid-19 crisis might be related to political participation. Drawing on recent studies, they find a strong relationship between the Covid-19 crisis and depressive symptoms. Holding this evidence up against US and European surveys demonstrating lower probability of voter turnout with increasing depressive symptoms, they suggest that Covid-19 may decrease political participation via declining mental health. They call for new strategies for mitigating depression’s impact on political participation and to reinvigorate participation in its aftermath.

Read more
August 27, 2020

Mediating Negative Narratives about Race in the Black Press and Social Media in a Public Health Crisis

by

The Black Press in the United States has a long history of countering negative racialization of Black people’s health. In keeping with this history, the Black Press was among the first voices to productively racialize the public health crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, highlighting the long-standing health disparities stemming from centuries of structural inequality. This productive racialization of public health—which extends to social media—constructs intersectional counternarratives, defying histories that position people of color as hosts of disease.

Read more
August 20, 2020

Dangers and Opportunities in the Coronavirus Crisis: US-China and China-Japan Relations

by

In Zheng Wang’s contribution to our “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, he examines how the pandemic shapes relations between countries when governments deploy it as a symbolic tool of statecraft. He first discusses how a rhetoric of blame for the spread of the coronavirus has deepened tensions between China and the United States. He then contrasts this with the interactions between China and Japan in the early stages of the pandemic. Japan’s provisions of masks to China, and the use of a Chinese poem on the shipping packages, helped reduce tensions in a relationship historically marked by distrust and suspicion.

Read more
August 20, 2020

War of the Worlds: Covid-19 and Pandemic Belligerence

by

What does it mean to wage a war against disease? Martial metaphors have pervaded the news since January 2020 when the coronavirus began to spread, from the rhetoric of political leaders to the imagery around the effort to contain the virus. Joining Jenny Reardon and Tim Hwang in examining these militaristic metaphors, Robert Peckham argues that such metaphors prevent us from engaging with the complexity of the pandemic and its long-term effects.

Read more
August 13, 2020

Placing the Pandemic in Time: Astrology and Covid-19

by

Many Americans have turned to astrology, the study of correlations between celestial patterns and temporal events, to make sense of tumultuous times. Despite reports of popular astrologers called out for failing to predict Covid-19, astrological services are in high demand. From private consultations to horoscopic forecasts across multiple media, people are eager to know when the pandemic will end and how it will affect their lives in the long run.

Read more
August 13, 2020

Covid-19, Ebola, and the Ethnographic Distance

by

For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Ilmari Käihkö reflects on the effects of distance. Mirroring the author’s experience of research impacted by the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Covid-19 too has forced a reckoning with the emergence of “new normalities” and the physical and social distancing imposed by viruses. Käihkö not only considers the work of ethnography from a distance, but also weighs the effects—and affects—of researching and writing in isolation.

Read more
August 6, 2020

Misinformation is Everybody’s Problem Now

by and

Misinformation can be deadly. The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated that fact clearly and tragically. While the big tech companies have taken some steps to rein in misinformation and make credible organizations more visible, they lag far behind the pundits, scammers, and extremists who abuse trust on a global scale. It’s time for companies and researchers to take risks, make bold experiments, and rigorously test ways to slow the speed and spread of deadly deceptions.

Read more
August 6, 2020

Health Econometrics and the Covid-19 Pandemic

by

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted epidemiological reliance upon models and statistics for understanding the impact and spread of the disease. Given the convergence of health and economics, it proves worthwhile to explore the origins, techniques, and status of econometric models as tools for health policy. For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Bryan Dowd recounts the history of econometrics and describes recent developments, showing that it has become a standard tool for analyzing data and informing policy decisions.

Read more
August 6, 2020

Research Supporting Policy, A Historical Perspective

by

For the “Covid-19 and the Social Sciences” series, Moshe Justman asks whether there may be tradeoffs in a model’s precision and its ability to inform policy. Justman explores the rise of randomized control trials (RCTs) in economics as the “gold standard” for inferring causality, and provides a detailed account of Project STAR—a landmark RCT study in education. A lesson for research informing policy on Covid-19, he argues, is that the messier models of epidemiologists are more useful to practitioners than the purportedly more rigorous RCTs designed by health economists.

Read more
July 30, 2020
1 2 3 4 5 6 … 11
Close