Knowing Covid-19

Knowing COVID-19 shows how COVID-19 moved from being a mysterious and frightening novel infectious disease to something that was subject to an enormous amount of knowledge production. This volume focuses specifically on the role of humanities research within this vast epistemological engine. Across eight empirical chapters, the volumes traces the role of researchers in the humanities as they brought their expertise to bear on vital unknown questions in and around the pandemic. These included: how to make at-home diagnostic tests understandable; how to communicate the risks of public transport without stigmatising people who use that transport; what problems a suddenly touch-free world would create for deafblind people; what forms of racism and racialized experience were likely to be worsened by the pandemic; and how workers in places like museums were going to be able to deal with sudden closures and furlough schemes. Across eight chapters, the volume shows how humanities research does not simply comprise a set of tools for interpretation and meaning, to be applied when a crisis has safely passed; rather it shows how collaborative, experimental, and risky humanities research has been vital to actually resolving - and living through - the COVID-19 crisis.