Series preface: The pandemic and beyond

Pascale Aebischer, Fred Cooper, Des Fitzgerald, Karen Gray, Caroline Redhead, Melanie Smallman and Victoria Tischler

In the first days of 2020, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic began to spread across the globe. It prompted a concerted international research effort which set out to understand not just the workings of the virus, but the ways that we responded to, lived and died with it. This led to a significant body of work being produced at speed, in which arts and humanities played a crucial role. In the UK, The Pandemic and Beyond: The Arts and Humanities Contribution to Covid Research and Recovery was established by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) early in 2021 to coordinate this research effort.¹ Over the span of two years, The Pandemic and Beyond grew into a virtual hub that enabled over seventy COVID-19 research teams funded by the AHRC to meet, exchange ideas and work together to ensure that their research would make a difference on the ground.²

This series is a legacy of this collaboration and bears witness to an extraordinary period, in which arts and humanities research became an integral part of the UK’s research response to an emergency, leading to tangible changes in the role, purpose and methods of the arts and humanities, and laying important human foundations for recovery. It is divided into four volumes, each corresponding to four research clusters co-produced during the coordination process. A first group focused on working with professionals and policymakers in the creative industries to investigate the existential struggles of creative workers and organisations impacted by the ban on live in-person performance, and to devise new ways of connecting people through live arts while trying to build more inclusive and sustainable industry structures. A second set of research teams connected arts and creative practitioners with cultural and community organisations, as well as care settings, with whom they worked to alleviate the social and mental health impacts of public health restrictions. These projects drew on arts- and nature-based activities to forge pathways for improving mental and physical health for individuals and communities. A third cluster examined the informational and epistemic experience of a pandemic that was a whirlwind of often deeply confusing and contested data. Artists, designers and linguists explored design solutions and devised how public health messages could be formulated so that they would reach the communities most severely affected by the spread of the virus. A final group of researchers concentrated on scrutinising legislation and guidance issued in haste, and grappled with thorny questions of rights and responsibilities, seeking to underpin developing scientific understanding with values-based frameworks that offered a more nuanced approach to balancing risks and benefits.

The richness of this research portfolio stems not only from its breadth but also from the ingenuity of the teams involved, members of which rapidly applied their expertise and creativity to a problem few had foreseen, working with communities whose vulnerabilities and prior marginalisation had been exacerbated disproportionately by the pandemic (Ryan, 2022: 198). What was initially perceived principally as a public health crisis was impacting on the population in myriad ways that branched well beyond physical health; encompassing mental health, but also social cohesion, cross-generational justice, trust in governance, and economic distress. Looking back over the first few years of the pandemic, the authors of a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) conclude that the ‘pandemic was a watershed moment for the Humanities because the importance of the variety and quality of individual human experience rose to the surface in our collective re-evaluation of priorities’ (Thain et al., 2023: 13). Arts and humanities research concentrated on the human impacts of the crises that intersected in this moment, working to resolve them, mitigate harms and examine some of the most fundamental human questions across macro and micro crisis contexts, from the national and international to the local and hyper-local. As these volumes show, this work was characterised by cross-fertilisation between disciplines and an emphasis on partnership working. It featured collaboration; between academic and public institutions, but also, notably, with community groups and frontline organisations, such as those representing health and social care. Collaborations also extended to industry, and regional, sectoral and national policymakers. We know from analysis of surveys of those involved in Pandemic and Beyond research that for many this involved drawing on existing relationships, which deepened and strengthened as the fluctuations of the pandemic necessitated constant dialogue and increased accountability on all sides (Aebischer et al., 2022: 26–29). For others, the pandemic resulted in potentially fruitful new connections, and the promise of further research, work that continues to be relevant and have impacts on policy and practice.

All of this required new ways of working, and the ability to reconcile the theoretically conceptualised and deliberative methodologies associated with humanities research, which often take years to mature into publication, with quick and direct application, which often left little scope for fine calibration and reflective writing. The temporal demand for research outputs, and their new or altered audiences, exerted intense and immediate demands on researchers. Policymakers expressed an appetite for actionable findings to support decision-making, and frontline workers, while exhausted and short of time and resources, were desperate for support; research, in consequence, was predominantly pragmatic and focused on solutions. This meant a sometimes uneasy pivot to new ways of working and new modalities and timescales for doing and sharing work. Researchers did not always find it easy to reach those for whom their findings might have been most relevant, but many published policy briefings or held private meetings to share their insights and recommendations with potential user groups. Some projects embedded researchers within policy or service delivery organisations, narrowing the gap between research and practice still further. Work was often cyclical or iterative, with results shared earlier and more frequently, for example through pre-prints or the release of preliminary findings; if not a direct prerequisite for funding, the word ‘rapid’ in the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) COVID-19 call certainly implied that researchers had to reconsider how and when in the life cycle of a project potentially significant knowledge was shared. There was a flowering of online engagement and dissemination as research was translated into a rich variety of deeply practical resources. These included frameworks for action, advice for public health messaging, interventions that responded to real-time problems such as the isolation of residents and staff in care homes or the design of personal protective equipment (PPE), and co-producing guidance for employers of artists performing in digital live shows from their homes.

As Pandemic and Beyond researchers explored the dynamic nature of individual and collective experiences of the pandemic, they also demonstrated a particular sensitivity to those for whom its effects have been felt unequally, and for whom suffering has been most profound. Readers will find this concern consistently exemplified throughout these volumes. Indeed, our brief to the authors in this series invited them to create a space where those voices could be part of the conversation. Such work was by no means easy to do. It was ethically complex, requiring heightened reflexivity and cultural competency. It was complicated by the requirements for social distancing and the need to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of both participants and researchers. As one research leader put it: ‘you cannot build diversity into a project from scratch under these conditions’ (Aebischer et al., 2022: 27).

Carrying out research during a pandemic necessitated innovation and adaptation at all levels. This is reflected in the research methods adopted: mixed, interdisciplinary and often participatory or arts-based, with projects bringing immediate benefits to participants and communities even as policymakers were targeted with written work. In many of the projects, more reflective and long-form modes of writing were either not part of the research design or postponed to a later date, to allow for retrospective analysis and evaluation. Meanwhile, the nascent field of arts and health was propelled to the foreground by the pandemic. A growing evidence base demonstrates the importance of multiple artistic modalities (including music, visual art, poetry and drama) in supporting health and wellbeing for a range of physical and mental health conditions. In these contexts, research by Pandemic and Beyond teams was able to highlight the vital role of artistic and creative practice through exposing the dangerousness of working conditions for frontline staff, including for the predominantly female workforce in social care settings. Arts-based projects were able to offer practical tools and emotional support for care workers, while helping to alleviate the isolation that many felt when confined to their homes by re-creating artistic activities that were delivered via post, online or outdoors. With remarkable speed, researchers working with arts and cultural providers pivoted to developing suitable resources and freely shared their work with collaborators and user groups.

At times, however, things moved frustratingly slowly, while structures around the research (including university recruitment, facilities, ethics and funding) creaked and failed to keep up; at other times, the most fundamental changes and compromises to research design had to be made at speed, to respond to events as they happened. When this research was at its best, there were refreshingly democratic opportunities for everyone involved to learn and apply new skills and take on new responsibilities. At their worst, however, the conditions in which research was conducted during the pandemic replicated existing structural problems in the academy. A great deal of the work was done by early career researchers on short-term contracts, for example, and researchers found themselves giving more than their contracted hours to this work, alongside their commitments to delivering newly remote or hybrid teaching, often while caring for home-schooled children or dealing with the impacts of the pandemic on their own networks and home environments. While it was often deeply rewarding, many researchers, like others in the population generally, found the lack of a distinction between home, work and the stresses of pandemic life difficult to negotiate. Remote working proved methodologically, physically and mentally challenging. However, as these chapters demonstrate so clearly, it led to the rapid creation and deployment of new tools and technologies for data collection, analysis and collaboration. These, in turn, are exerting pressure on funders and policymakers in UK Higher Education to adapt their frameworks to recognise the value and complexity of this type of crisis- and solutions-oriented collaborative response in arts and humanities research.

The work presented in this series as a distinctive and coherent portfolio is, of course, just part of a much wider programme of research to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and to address the COVID-19 emergency that was funded through UKRI.³ While the projects within the Pandemic and Beyond portfolio were all designed, in line with the parameters of the original rapid-response funding call, to take a largely UK focus, a range of other projects and funding calls cast their gaze further afield. For some existing projects with an international focus, this ‘created new opportunities for exploration of existing topics’ that were exacerbated by the pandemic (Pirgova-Morgan, 2022: 27). Other schemes which are not represented in these volumes, for instance the UKRI Global Research Challenges/Newton Fund, brought together researchers in the UK and in low- and middle-income countries. More than forty such collaborative projects sought to gain insights and provide support during the pandemic, including projects aiming to improve engagement with COVID-19 public health messages to develop online psychological support through the arts in Rwanda; and to find ways of engaging vulnerable communities in Brazil on the consequences of the pandemic. This range of international projects is likely to offer an opportunity for further reflection, comparisons, dialogue and lessons in the future.

At the same time, we should not forget that despite the COVID-19 pandemic being, by definition, a global phenomenon, it has also been markedly culturally specific, local and hyper-local. Even in purely scientific terms, the identity of the virus itself has not been a global constant. Different strains and variants have emerged in different geographies and populations, and symptoms and morbidities have varied from country to country, creating very different patterns of disease across the world. Similarly, our responses to the pandemic and our standards of evidence and certainty – alongside modes of reasoning, ways of knowing and understanding – vary across cultural contexts, as we encounter different policymaking arrangements and civic communities. This is clear from the comparative work of the ‘Lex Atlas’ research in the Pandemic and Beyond portfolio, whose researchers examined dozens of countries’ legal responses to the pandemic (King and Ferraz, 2021–23). Lessons learned in one country do not, therefore, translate cleanly to others.

Even within the UK, the response to COVID-19 was not uniformly governed or experienced. Nor did the disease spread evenly across the country. Time and time again, low-income households and communities, as well as groups with pre-existing vulnerabilities, felt the worst effects of both the disease and the measures put in place to protect the population. This pandemic was perhaps also one of the most challenging instances in which the arrangements for devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the powers of the Westminster Government to oversee or coordinate national responses, were put to the test, prompting comparative analysis of the different modes and mechanisms of parliamentary review across the UK. This was complemented by scrutiny of data-driven approaches to decision-making and research that probed ethical and human rights issues. A deep delve into the situation in the UK provides us with valuable insight into the state of the nation – as well as our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic – in the early twenty-first century.

While arts and humanities research on COVID-19 in the UK is ongoing, and many are now engaged in the more considered process of retrospective analysis and critique, this series, produced at the endpoint of the rapid-response funding period, does represent a significant milestone. As such, it offers an opportunity to reflect on the multiple temporalities and intersectional crises that have characterised the first two years of the pandemic, along with the wider epistemic structures and infrastructures at stake in the delivery of this research portfolio. While COVID-19 had a fairly temporally precise beginning in the final days of 2019, at least as a distinct viral emergency, and was formalised as a global emergency with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of a pandemic on 11 March 2020, it can also be understood as, at least in part, the product of a deeper crisis in terms of anthropogenic climate change and how we interact with the non-human (Gupta et al., 2021). COVID-19 has been a profoundly transformative, rupturing crisis, with over two million dead in Europe alone (WHO, 2022b). Worldwide, anxiety and depression increased by 25 per cent (WHO, 2022a), and access to professional services was challenging; over 100 million lost their jobs (WEF, 2021), and while some accessed furlough and insurance payments, freelancers and those in the gig economy were often ineligible (Fowler, 2020). COVID-19 identified and shone a light on ‘key workers’, who were defined as those whose work was deemed essential during the pandemic and who often turned out to be poorly paid, socially marginalised and previously ‘invisible’. These workers included healthcare professionals as well as bus drivers, food retailers, refuse collectors and care home staff. While healthcare staff were routinely celebrated in the UK, most notably through the ‘clap for our carers’ phenomenon, this was not accompanied by material changes in stagnant pay or harmful working conditions, and others – such as domiciliary workers in care homes with older people – remained largely invisible.

As the virus began to transform the ways that we live and die, it pulled a series of overlapping crises and temporalities into tension, muddying any clean imagining of a shared pandemic trajectory. When the UK government announced extensive restrictions to movement and social life in the spring of 2020, disability scholars and activists noted that many disabled people had effectively been in ‘lockdown’ for years (Shakespeare et al., 2021). Likewise, COVID-19 intersected with deep-seated inequalities in race and health, landing disproportionately among people who had their ability to resist the virus eroded by generations of structural racism, and who were knowingly figured as disposable and exposed to greater risk than their white counterparts (Qureshi et al., 2022). Whole groups of people, including frail older people and those with underlying health conditions, were disproportionately negatively impacted. Other long and slow disasters and matters of justice (such as poverty, burnout in healthcare workers, or our inability to sufficiently care for the old) further altered the temporal bounds of the pandemic and fragmented our experiences of pandemic time (Baraitser and Salisbury, 2020). For doctors, nurses, cleaners and porters in overstretched hospital departments, time sped up (often in catastrophic ways); for those who were shielding or placed on furlough, the opposite was frequently true.

Among this profound and intractable messiness, attempts to impose a temporal order on the pandemic have always done a particular kind of political work. Across the conception and execution of these four volumes, rates of infection, illness and death have been in considerable flux; the state of the pandemic at the date of publication is impossible to know as we write this introduction in early 2023. We do know, however, that pandemics rarely – if ever – cleanly end (Greene and Vargha, 2020). The overlapping contexts and crises detailed above also frame wildly divergent apprehensions and realities of risk. Any intimation that we are becoming ‘post-pandemic’ must be met with a question the arts and humanities are uniquely poised to ask: for whom? The bereaved, still shielding, sufferers from ‘long COVID’, carers and healthcare professionals, after all, will continue to live pandemic time in different ways (Callard and Perego, 2021). One role of the arts and humanities amid this crisis is (or has been) to make and preserve meaning out of what has been experienced. In each of these volumes, ‘rapid-response’ arts and humanities work has had to navigate these slippery experiences of time. If many of our projects responded to the pandemic first in ways that were ‘quick and dirty’, acting to comprehend, forestall, or inform the present, the research assembled here is more inclined to the future, seeking to take a tentative and reflective step back from the immediacy of the pandemic while acknowledging its ongoing nature.

The format of the crisis-driven rapid-response call is itself an unusual approach to the organisation of arts and humanities research, with its distinctively longitudinal and reflective modes of relating to social problems. In one sense, this speedy deployment of the arts and humanities at a moment of crisis is welcome: it positions researchers within these disciplines as having skills that are critical for intervening in moments of emergency and lifts humanities research out of the epistemic position of providing commentary or representational analysis after the event. It thus refuses the disingenuous political position that cultural, literary, historical and theory-informed analysis is incompatible with the crisis resolution. Indeed, as this is a moment in which arts and humanities research is itself widely understood to be in crisis (see Thain et al., 2023), this instrumentalisation presents important new possibilities, and perhaps one or two pitfalls, for scholars within these disciplines. The assumption – implicit in the funding announcement – that research in the arts and humanities is already collaborative, engaged, pragmatic, problem-oriented, public-facing and interdisciplinary, an image which many in the humanities research community have been promoting for some years, often in the face of opposition from colleagues, is itself worthy of note.

This also follows a long-standing trend in which humanities research, whose structures have predominantly been based (somewhat stereotypically) on the model of a lone scholar, working diligently on their idiosyncratic topic over a period of years, is remade to resemble a more scientific model. Such a ‘scientific model’ notably involves the organisation of a project into research teams and work packages, the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries that are not methodologically salient, larger amounts of money being awarded to smaller numbers of research teams, the need to clearly articulate the public impact of research, and responsiveness to government and industry priorities. This trend has been clearly accelerated by the reorganisation of humanities research infrastructures during the COVID-19 pandemic, which, as we noted above, led to a much greater degree of collaboration, with several authors working remotely to write together, crossing institutional, geographical, disciplinary and hierarchical boundaries. The epistemic effects of such reorganisation have been real – and mixed. The organisation of research, after all, plays a large role in governing not just the type of writing possible in such circumstances, but also what research can and cannot be done. While the funding that framed the Pandemic and Beyond portfolio opened up many new possibilities for humanities researchers, it simultaneously foreclosed others. Scholars without a desire to work in teams, whose research did not need significant money or have clearly defined short- to medium-term impacts, will have struggled to contribute; a significant loss that mostly remains invisible. This portfolio showcases many new opportunities, but it also hides the opportunity costs – not only for humanities work directly on COVID-19, but for humanities research generally, as already scarce resources were poured into immediate responses to a single public health crisis.

In the context of a UK government research funding strategy which, as the March 2023 HEPI report notes, ‘appears to downplay the position of the Arts and Humanities in the UK’s ambition to become a “science superpower”’ (Thain et al., 2023: 19), there is a wider political dimension to this, too. The COVID-19 crisis also coincided with a series of crises around Brexit, one of the most prominent of which concerned the possibility of the UK’s participation in (or exclusion from) the EU’s Horizon research programme. This created a context in which research was wielded openly as a token of national competitiveness, and international collaboration was reframed as a luxury that could be removed at a government’s whim. While the UK focus of the Pandemic and Beyond research shielded this portfolio from some of these pressures, we nevertheless continuously faced the need to demonstrate, in a political climate ill-disposed to critical humanities thinking, the relevance, success, impact or transformational potential of this body of research. Against this backdrop, it was often tempting to frame our work to make it align with (party) political slogans such as ‘build back better’ or ‘levelling up’ to demonstrate a willingness to engage with political priorities. The need to establish such ‘synergies’ is now a common and perhaps unavoidable feature of research coordination and curation efforts such as that of Pandemic and Beyond. Indeed, the research we share through these volumes should also be understood in the context of a wider, global attack on the humanities, whether departmental closures in the United Kingdom, the driver for teaching efficiencies in Denmark, or legislative attacks in countries such as Hungary and the United States. The quick pivot to rapid-response work on COVID-19 is both an affirmative rebuttal to such attacks (our work is indeed both important and useful) and a frank recognition of how successful they have been (our work is only viable to the extent that we can successfully position it as both important and useful). Our work, then, while bearing witness to the importance, usefulness and practical applicability of arts and humanities research in crisis contexts, also situates itself within broader national and international debates about the role arts and humanities play in fostering and sustaining the creative and open-ended critical thinking that underpins democratic political structures.

The Pandemic and Beyond seriesThe Pandemic and Beyond series

The aim of this series is to preserve the breadth of the approaches taken by Pandemic and Beyond researchers in addressing the crisis, showcasing a form of arts and humanities research that has learned how to respond to, and mitigate, COVID-19 as it unfolded, and that has constantly adapted its methods and research questions to ongoing developments and the needs of research participants. Reflecting the variety of the Pandemic and Beyond research portfolio, the chapters we have selected range from in-depth reflection on schools of thought and social and governance structures that have influenced approaches to the pandemic to those that are much more ‘hands-on’. These latter chapters address subjects sometimes sidelined in conventional academic writing, as their focus on working structures, industrial practices and lived experience does not always lend itself easily to conceptual debates and theorisation. Written from the retrospective vantage point of late 2022 and the first months of 2023, these chapters offer a rare insight into the findings and often invisible facets of research projects whose primary focus was rapid on-the-ground impact, knowledge exchange, and direct engagement with communities, organisations and decision-makers. The chapters we collect not only offer reflection on what the research teams achieved, but also on what could be learned from their experiences to guide future responses to ongoing, accelerating and emerging crises, whether in relation to climate, migration, violent conflict, the threat of vaccine-resistant coronavirus variants, or other pathogens that could develop into new pandemics. The result is a series which models how, in responding to a crisis, the creativity, cultural sensitivity, community-reach and knowledge base of arts and humanities researchers can be one of the best tools to understand a novel virus in all its dimensions, steer policy and alleviate suffering on the ground.

In our volume Adaptation and Resilience in the Performing Arts, we explore how live performing arts in the UK innovated during public health restrictions to everyday life to overcome the obstacles to co-presence and performance in shared spaces that were a side-effect of pandemic mitigation measures. The volume explores the financial hardship and mental health impacts experienced by industry professionals as governmental discourses regarding the ‘viability’ of arts careers, alongside the difficulties of connecting with networks and accessing arts opportunities, put a particular strain on creative workers and freelancers in the UK at a time when some Latin American countries were leading the way in valuing and supporting the arts. Against this backdrop of existential struggle for creative workers, this volume celebrates the ingenuity and creativity of artists and researchers who applied themselves to finding both digital and analogue solutions to the problem of co-presence, and who, in so doing, broadened the access of previously marginalised communities to live performing arts. It highlights projects that explored how motion-capture and green screen technologies can enable performers to come together despite geographical distance and interact in a shared virtual space to create new work, and how such digital work affects their art, wellbeing and ability to reach wider audiences. It also champions the value of local initiatives in outdoor spaces and suggests avenues for artists and local governments to reimagine towns and cities as performance venues in which diverse communities can gather to celebrate their location and ability to communally enjoy art amid a pandemic.

The mobilisation of existing natural, community and cultural assets and resources to support individual and community wellbeing – conducted at speed and often using novel modes of delivery – was a notable feature of pandemic responses across the UK. Our volume Creative Approaches to Wellbeing presents detailed examples of research looking at how these kinds of activities sought to address issues such as the challenges of isolation, to support health and care workers, or to create spaces that could enable coping, recovery or renewal. Common to the chapters here are reflections on what it means and what tools and systems might be needed if we are to develop resilience during and after such crises in future, alongside examination of ideas of ‘vulnerability’. Authors bring to these discussions a particular focus on the experiences of those most marginalised during the pandemic because of mental or physical ill-health, age, or due to deep-seated structural and systemic inequalities. Individual contributions include an interrogation of the idea of ‘togetherness’ itself; an invitation to consider the benefits of ‘walking creatively’, a study of the work of small organisations in promoting health through interaction with urban nature; and investigations of the contributions of the cultural, museum and literary heritage sectors to wellbeing. Looking forward, authors invite us to consider how adaptations to ways of working for individuals, within organisations, and even at the level of a whole city region, could lead to changes in provision and lessons for practice.

Knowing COVID-19 looks at how different kinds of knowledge and meaning have been created and communicated, and the repercussions this has had – and continues to have – for how COVID-19 is managed, experienced, understood and remembered. Knowledge-making, it suggests, took various forms, and these are reflected in the diversity of chapters this volume curates. In the first instance, it demonstrates a rich humanities tradition of constructive critique, as ‘official’ communications around ‘staying home’, ‘keeping distance’, safety on buses, lateral flow testing, and vaccine hesitancy are tested and interrogated. Through this collective work, we see one of the clear, indisputable values of the humanities; their attentiveness to the human, and the clarifying or reflective power this might have had with greater embeddedness in policy and information design. In the second instance – and frequently both are accomplished in the same short chapter – this volume collects a series of interventions which set out specifically to create and sustain meaning, particularly when dominant cultural narratives over the pandemic rely on those meanings slipping away from political or popular memory. Thus, we have rich and detailed explorations of the experiences of museum workers, people told to ‘stay home’, older victims of gender-based violence, people with deafblindness, and racialised nurses working in the NHS; as well as extensive reflection on what it was like to make the projects which formalised this knowledge work. Taken as a whole, this volume critiques and redefines pandemic epistemologies, assembling a partial blueprint for making future crises legible.

Finally, Governance, Democracy and Ethics in Crisis-Decision-Making explores what it means to be in a situation in which rational or epistemic framings of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on data and scientific ways of knowing the world, rub up against more entangled accounts. In these accounts, humans, the virus and governance arrangements coexist as a broader, relational whole. Human connections, personal fulfilment and social groupings are inextricably intertwined with matters (and meanings) of governance, ethics and authority, the rule of law, the economy and, crucially, public health. Looking at issues ranging from the authority of the WHO and the power of data during an emergency, to the role of public engagement as a source of policy evidence, we reflect on what it means to govern ethically in a pandemic, and whether the expected standards and norms of public life, evidence and decision-making should be different in times of crisis. We also reflect on how the long tail of the pandemic seems impossible to disentangle from a reduced trust in power and authority, creating an urgent need for ethics to move beyond normative assertions of the law and regulations. Our authors provide some suggestions as to how these things might be balanced more ethically and effectively in the future.

In 2020 and 2021, when televised government briefings on COVID-19 remained commonplace, ministers insisted time and again that they were ‘following the science’ (Colman et al., 2021). Even when critics called the accuracy of this rhetorical device into question, they rarely troubled the governing logic that, were we only willing to follow it, scientific and medical evidence offered an unclouded route map through the pandemic. However, ‘[c]‌oping with the pandemic was (for the lucky majority who were not severely ill) not so much a medical crisis as an existential one’ (Thain et al., 2023: 13); indeed, given the complex interplay of social, cultural, ethical, economic and political framings of health, illness and disease, there is no such thing as a purely medical crisis (Ryan, 2022). The Pandemic and Beyond series reveals how the arts and humanities research community rose to the challenge of this complexity, growing in confidence as it became increasingly clear that our methodologies, forms of knowledge and creative mindsets were key not only to tackling this all-encompassing human emergency, but, in so doing, to alleviating human suffering. As one of our researchers commented:

If, as another Pandemic and Beyond researcher put it, this work ‘has been a game-changer’ in revealing the skill and generosity of the research community (Aebischer et al., 2022: 29), then it is also a call to action in the future, as we face a multitude of ongoing and emerging crises, from climate to migration and economic decline, which demand collective and civic responsibility and the willingness to continue to combine nuanced and context-sensitive thinking with a solutions-focused approach.

Without the vast collective knowledge, experience, methodological tools and expertise on which this type of research draws, our responses to ongoing challenges and future crises can only ever be impoverished. Expecting politicians of the future to say that they are ‘following the humanities’ might be wishful thinking. A pandemic response which made more extensive use of the kinds of evidence and interventions on show in these volumes, however, would have been far more attentive to questions of power and justice; understood how, why and when particular people felt – and became – less safe; had a far better handle on how we engage with public health advice or vaccination drives; and begun from a richer knowledge of what the arts can do to keep us feeling human in the most difficult of circumstances. As a recent essay on climate change suggests, the arts and humanities have to be equal to the series of interlocking emergencies which frame our present historical moment (Pietsch and Flanagan, 2020). Over the past three years, scholars and practitioners have painstakingly built a ‘pandemic humanities’ – and a pandemic arts and cultural sector – which demonstrates that the arts and humanities are more than equal to the task. Creating the conditions for this work to (continue to) thrive must, surely, constitute one of the best forms of crisis preparedness we have.