Course Description

Some questions we will grapple with throughout the 6-week course include:

● What is power? Privilege? How have power and privilege shaped individual and communities’ experiences of COVID-19?

o What is the role of race and ethnicity?

o Social class and economic structures?

o Gender and family?

● Amidst the profound challenges posed by the pandemic, how can everyday people from marginalized communities practice resilience and resistance? How do they use history? Discourse?

● What is “home”? What counts as home in a pandemic?

● How are pandemics understood, studied, experienced, and responded to in contexts outside of the United States?

● How can disciplinary perspectives illuminate different aspects of our worlds and experiences during COVID-19?

The course is designed so that we will learn not only about COVID-19, but also from it, using the pandemic as a “lens” to understand social inequities, as well as social movements, creative resistance, and agency of everyday people. We will also reflect on the ways in which the different theoretical and conceptual frameworks can help us understand ourselves in the world, in a variety of contexts.