About This Project

As of this writing, well over 300,000 people in the US have died of COVID-19, and globally this figure approaches 2 million lives lost. Even for those of us who are lucky to have remained safe and healthy, the pandemic has transformed our life in myriad ways that we could not have imagined at the start of 2020.

This project is just one small contribution to our understanding of the social, cultural, political, and environmental dimensions of the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors are students in Medical Geography, an intermediate-level geography course at Macalester College. I have taught this course many times, and before 2020 I had often used epidemics—e.g., Ebola in West Africa in 2014, Zika virus in the Americas in 2016—as useful case studies for illustrating the geographic lens on public health emergencies. For most of us, though, this is our first direct experience of a truly global pandemic.

As a result of the pandemic, we've had to change the way we teach and learn. I met with this amazing group of 27 Macalester students in a variety of configurations in the second "module" of the Fall semester. We employed a hybrid format, a combination of online/remote and in-person teaching. The second wave of the pandemic in Minnesota forced all instruction to move online in mid-November, deepening our familiarity with software tools like Zoom, Moodle, and VoiceThread. Starting around that time, students began to delve more deeply into their research for the thematic essays that form the core of this collective project. And all along, the students have been recording their thoughts in "pandemic journals"—excerpts from these journals can be found on each of authors' personal pages. Our class TA, Aubrey Hagen, provided valuable feedback on the journals and helped this group project take shape.

So how does a "geographic" lens help us make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic? First, medical geography takes a broadly "environmental" or "ecological" perspective on public health problems. Viruses like COVID-19 emerge out of human-environment interactions in specific kinds of places, which increase the likelihood of viral "spillover" from other animal species into our own. But there is also a social environment that influences risk in the pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic has laid bare existing social inequalities and racial gaps that make some communities more vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19. Similarly, the widespread move to online distance learning in K-12 education, though a reasonable response to the pandemic, exposes the "digital divide" in the US and exacerbates existing achievement gaps between rich and poor families.

Geographers also tend to take a multi-scalar approach—that is, a recognition that the nature of a problem changes depending on the scale of analysis. The diffusion of the COVID-19 virus around the world followed a somewhat predictable structure, via air travel networks between major population centers. In some countries that may be considered role models for effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, geospatial tools (including geocoded cell phone analytics) have been used to develop a more intricate understanding of human movement and encounters in space—potential pathways of contagion that could be averted through targeted policies.

Medical geography, similar to other fields like medical anthropology, social epidemiology, and disease ecology, takes a holistic view of public health, leading us to analyze all the relevant dimensions of a public health problem. For that reason, even as we attempt to stay neutral and objective in our analysis, political questions are unavoidable. We must analyze the international response to COVID-19, led by the WHO, and consider structural defects in global health governance that must be addressed to prevent future pandemics of this scale. The US government response has, in many respects, been poorly coordinated, and issues like establishing criteria for closing businesses and acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine have been drawn into the vortex of political polarization in the US.

As I write these words, millions of doses of vaccine against COVID-19 are being distributed, here in the US and in countries around the world. There is, perhaps, a "light at the end of the tunnel." A vaccine is the most reductionist solution possible—a sort of "magic bullet" in public health that supposedly obviates the need for the kind of holistic, integrative, politically conscious analysis that medical geography tends to promote. I humbly admit that geography will not "save us" from this pandemic (or the next one); moreover, I am in awe of the effort, expertise, and cutting-edge techniques of the bioscientists who made safe and effective vaccines available to the public in record time. And yet, I feel confident that the perspective of geography (along with other liberal arts) gives us the tools to ask challenging questions about the human condition. Above all, the thoughtful essays in this collection lead me to ask:

Before everything goes "back to normal," what are the things that we need to change?

Eric D. Carter

Macalester College

December 18, 2020

Information on this site is current as of the above date.

For any questions, contact me at ecarter@macalester.edu .