Members of the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center‘s Pandemicene Project – faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students – have co-developed a study into what we are calling The Pandemicene. Aiming to produce knowledge that can help all of us – scholars and scientists, students and activists – The Pandemicene Project is helping us imagine and enact just futures in our home state of California and in our communities worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Pandemicene Project is rooted from the premise that creating trust-worthy knowledge that can foster a more just world requires attending to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the deep inequalities and fissures in the polity that this pandemic has laid bare. It also requires attending both to what is going on locally (e.g., from the shelter-in-place locations of our students), while drawing on the power and insights of global networks.
In early March 2020, as the Science & Justice Research Center (SJRC) pivoted all activities from in-person to remote, we found ourselves in the midst of a historic remaking of our entangled worlds. To make sense of and respond to this moment, the SJRC launched an undergraduate internship and Founding Director Jenny Reardon designed and – with graduate student teaching assistant Lucia Vitale (politics) – taught an undergraduate independent study seminar SOCY 194: Living and Learning in a Pandemic: The Sociology of COVID-19. This seminar drew upon insights from the Sociology of Medicine, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Studies and Critical Race Theory to study the COVID-19 pandemic.
Through Summer and Fall, the PandemiTeam worked together through their initial questions and inquiries via the below emerging areas by interviewing SJRC’s robust network of local and international public health experts, scholars, and practitioners who are leading our way through this critical historical moment. More on the developing areas of concern appear in the campus news article, “Discrimination, governance, and trust in the age of COVID-19”, explained by SJRC Founding Director Jenny Reardon.
- Re-Worlding: Living and Learning Alone Together in the Pandemicene
- Community, Civil Society and Social Justice Responses to COVID-19
- Just Biomedicine in an Age of COVID-19: How Can Researchers (Public Health, Genomics, Virologists, Bioethicists) Collaborate in New Ways?
- The Challenges of Knowing and Responding in the Age of No Data and Mis-information
- The Crisis of Public Health in Infrastructures of Care and Incarceration
The PandemiTeam collected resources for teaching about COVID-19, called attention to open response letters and calls to action, and archived relevant online events. Students in Reardon’s SOCY 194 seminar co-created a Zine based on everyone’s unique quarantine experiences and interests in understanding local responses to the pandemic. From interviews, student interns produced a blog series and podcast series broadcasted through the campus radio station (KZSC 88.1 FM) and Spotify.
In Winter 2021, additional students and independent researchers were welcomed to The PandemiTeam to expand the project and interviewed members of their communities, policy makers, practitioners, and mutual-aid and community organizers.
To take part in or contribute to this project, email Colleen Stone (colleen@ucsc.edu) and/or Jenny Reardon (reardon1@ucsc.edu).