COVID Studies | Manifold Scholarship
<b>A “state of the field” collection of essays that presents the latest research on the pandemic from a range of disciplines</b>
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<I>COVID Studies</I> is a “state of the field” collection of essays that presents the latest research on the pandemic from a range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, public policy, political science, history, and science and technology studies. Though varied in their methodologies, whether ethnography, data analysis, or archival research, the contributors together view COVID not as an isolated event with a discrete beginning and end, but rather as an ongoing crisis that resulted from and has shaped underlying social and political conditions.
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As the essays demonstrate, COVID is a nested disaster: a deadly and debilitating virus woven through traumatically inadequate health systems in the United States and around the world. COVID is also a compound disaster, entangled with climatic disasters of land, air, and sea, and grinding against the tragedies of migration, war, and political dysfunction. Taking COVID and its lessons out of the museum of past disasters, where powerful people and institutions want it to remain, this volume puts it right back into the middle of our lives, where it belongs for now, and surely for a very long time to come.
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Although no longer formally acknowledged as a pandemic by global health officials, COVID nevertheless is a continuing disaster due to its toll on life, health, economy, safety, and justice. Examining the pandemic as a process that was shaped by longer histories of what came before it and that continues to make new realities in the present, the contributors suggest that we are still researching and writing from inside the disaster.
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![The 1893 drought will, according to the science journal Nature in July, ‘unquestionably take its place among the recorded events of history, if regard be had to its intensity [and] the length of time during which it has lasted’. Communities reported being stretched beyond endurance. Rivers ran dry, reservoirs dropped to record lows, wells failed, and domestic water supplies were restricted to a few hours per day. But while the 1893 drought was severe, it was not unusual. As this article reveals, urban and rural communities faced regular droughts of varying intensity and duration during the long nineteenth century. What did this mean for them? Where previous interest in extreme weather events has focused on recovering historic patterns, or examined resilience or adaption, this article explores the lived experiences of drought to offer a new perspective on the impact of weather shocks and water scarcity on people’s lives. By combining evidence from meteorological reports, newspapers, official reports, and local government archives, the article undercovers the fragility of urban and rural water supplies and examines how behaviours were adapted in response to water scarcity and precarity.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mvpup65ek2edpkpehxkb7mng/bafkreibwxt4p74hrfvn6jfhajqbew2xpthsyfdla5ynq5uhtcgthg4xccu)