History in the Making: COVIDCalls and the COVID-19 Pandemic
by Scott Gabriel Knowles and Bucky Stanton, Scott Gabriel Knowles, and Bucky Stanton
Disasters are now a permanent feature of American life—no longer confined to predictable seasons or geographies—in the era of hyperglobalization and its related climate change, a disaster in one part of the world affects all of us. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates this fact with a vengeance. History and social studies teachers have special responsibilities to provide students with deep and rich context for understanding disasters so that they don’t seem surprising, decontextualized, cut off from the continuities of economic, political, and social life.
COVIDCalls is a disaster/science communication public history project currently underway in the midst of the pandemic. COVIDCalls engages historians and other humanities/social science researchers, alongside natural and physical scientists, public health experts, journalists, and artists to translate what are often esoteric research findings into understandable, useful lessons for a broad audience. In this public history mode, COVIDCalls seeks to provide viewers/listeners with information, and inspire greater curiosity into the structural issues made apparent by the pandemic, and disasters more generally.
COVIDCalls is a live discussion hosted by disaster historian Scott Gabriel Knowles, a professor of history at Drexel University. Bucky Stanton, a graduate student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, serves as the key production assistant for the project. The program takes place every weekday, and is broadcast via Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Periscope. Immediately following the live broadcast, the COVIDCalls episode is edited with music and breaks and archived as a podcast, made available via all major streaming platforms. On the day COVIDCalls started, March 16, 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center there were globally 181,328 cases and 7,180 deaths from COVID-19. There were eighty-eight deaths in the USA. By the time of the one hundredth episode on August 7, 160,702 people in the United States had died of COVID-19. The remarkable speed with which this disaster has unfolded demands rapid response from researchers, combined with thoughtful reflection, and a strategy to communicate humanities/social science research. COVIDCalls works in these domains.
One of the challenges we have is simply in the way that the public discussion of disasters is constructed in the media. Death counts are too simplistic. Complicated policy discussions become partisan shout matches. History is absent, and expert voices are crammed into sound bites. Disasters are too frequently described as external events—they happen to us, the temporality is linear and brief, we recover from them—with very brief background and limited exploration of deeper social structures and disaster impacts. It is much more the case—and we are seeing this with COVID-19—that a disaster is the result of a great number of interconnected processes. Disasters don’t come to us from the outside, but they reveal the society we have. We don’t recover back to some previous whole: the disaster becomes part of us, woven into the fabric of our lives in our memories, our psychology, our laws, and our science.
Disaster researchers and other guests on COVIDCalls bring out of obscurity the historical links among decisions made to privilege the health of some and not others across history. Disaster researchers in this public venue also suggest ways to keep those linkages right in front of us, and even suggest tools of analysis, care, and policy to keep the truth of disaster inequality at the forefront—through the present and the future of this pandemic, and beyond. In doing so COVIDCalls is also forming a historical record of the pandemic—transcripts now run to over 1.3 million words, and will be released in late 2020 in a digital research archive.
COVIDCalls presents myriad opportunities for teachers and students to live history. All too often history has the same primary problem of disaster communication: a rigid discreteness. In our material and historical world, nothing is discrete. Through use of the COVIDCalls archive, teachers and students can explore and themselves become adventurers of the inexhaustible processual world around us. Three areas for potential focus in the classroom are pandemic history, social inequality, and knowledge and uncertainty.
Historians from Dipesh Chakrabarty to Monica Green to John Barry (and many, many others) have been featured. COVIDCalls also hosts journalists, thus far including Maiken Scott, Virginia Heffernan, Andrew Revkin, Robinson Meyer, and many others. The combination of historians and other researchers, health experts, and journalists is essential to bring light to overlooked and under-studied factors in the pandemic. COVIDCalls will broadcast consistently for the rest of 2020 and into 2021 so that the discussions can reach an expanding audience, with the goal of building connections among researchers, fostering new research, and bringing in-depth questions and research into the hands of journalists. Partnerships are essential to the continuation of COVIDCalls. Partnered episodes have been conducted (or will be in the coming months) with the Academy of Natural Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and American Scientists Magazine.
Making Pandemic History
One historiographical juncture that COVIDCalls explores is the history of pandemics. Pandemics are often characterized with a fatalism in popular discussion. They come, affected societies are strained, eventually some immunity is reached, and they pass—but is this the end of the story? Discussions with historians of pandemics have revealed a much more textured perspective. For example, long assumed a relic of the medieval past, the bubonic plague in nineteenth-century Portugal is discussed in Episode #31 with Dr. Tiago Saraiva and Dr. Caroline Grego. Further discussion in Episode #43 with Dr. Monica Green and Dr. Jacob Steere-Williams revealed the plague as not some ancient bacterial menace but an ever-evolving contagion that required ever-widening social production to contain. As the pandemic was beaten back, a different society—and a different future—emerged.
COVIDCalls’ historical discussions inevitably lead to the present inequities revealed by the pandemic. So significant is the manifestation of these historical inequities based on race and class in our economic system that in Episode #55 Dr. Rashawn Ray insightfully noted that racism is itself a social pandemic left untreated in America. Discussions of racial inequity connect to environmental justice, such as in Episode #25, where the temporalities of New Orleans’s slavery past and environmentally strained present collided. Class-based inequities have been explored in Episode #36 on the lack of material, economic support for essential workers. Episode #121 with Philadelphia “trashman” and labor organizer Terrill Haigler revealed the increasing instability of essential working-class jobs, which are vital in a world of lockdowns.
COVIDCalls’ survey of the societal chaos of the pandemic has exposed the uncertainty of evolving knowledge and confirms the useful but inherently partial perspective that science provides. In Episode #8 the slowness of science in an uncertain world is explored, showing the inherent tension between quality science and the quarterly business cycle. Episodes #76 and #123 traverse the contested scientific terrain of a potential vaccine, further peeling back the politics of science. Episodes #7 and #106 look at the lives of science journalists and field scientists, both noting the difficulties of reporting accurate data in a constantly shifting pandemic landscape, bringing to light the lives of scientific experts.
This essay has briefly introduced the possibilities for history teachers and all educators to engage with COVIDCalls in order to offer a more complex, shifting portrait of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic to their students. How could we ask so much in such precarious times? To quote the title of Episode #5 of COVIDCalls, unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. Never in recent times has the student needed so urgently a historical education that provides the ability to understand both science and the historical contexts of science in the economy, politics, and society. Educators must rise to the challenge and help students not only live but make history. We invite educators to bootstrap their own online discussions much like we have, to record the shifting impressions of students and to welcome students into the production process. Please contact us with any questions, resources, collaborations or conversations—the work has just begun, and we’d love to have you on COVIDCalls.
COVIDCalls
If you are interested in COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 global pandemic, join online, Monday−Friday at 5 p.m. ET
Live Video on:
You can send questions to host Scott Gabriel Knowles (sgk23@drexel.edu).
COVIDCalls Podcast
Scott Gabriel Knowles is department head and professor of history at Drexel University. He is the author of The Disaster Experts: Mastering Risk in Modern America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), and is series co-editor of Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster (University of Pennsylvania Press, launched 2014). A faculty research fellow of the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware, he is currently co-authoring an edited volume on the Fukushima disasters.
Bucky Stanton is a graduate student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.