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Introduction – Knowing COVID-19
The pandemic and beyond

The introduction to Knowing COVID-19 sets out the challenge of making the pandemic knowable, and situates the work of the humanities in that collective epistemological project. In the face of often quite concerted efforts to make important meanings slip away, humanities research took a proactive, immediate role in exploring complexity, cataloguing particular kinds of adversity and harm, and rendering a swiftly changing world more legible. With specific attention to the Lateral Flow Test, Cooper and Fitzgerald reflect on the humanities expertise that makes 'good' - as opposed to obscured, constrained, or partial - knowing possible, even in something so seemingly scientifically bounded as detecting the presence of the virus in saliva. They then outline the eight thematic chapters, and place them in a wider story of epistemology in the pandemic humanities.

In April 2021, the UK Government announced that free lateral flow tests (LFTs) for COVID-19 were to be made available to the public through pharmacies and test centres, following several months of trials in schools and universities. The announcement came on the heel of a growing realisation, through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, that large numbers of people with the virus experienced no symptoms at all, or mild symptoms that could be difficult to discern from seasonal influenza or the common cold. This posed a problem during a period when, in many countries, pandemic governance was still operating through a strategy of isolation and containment, at least formally: without regular mass testing, significant numbers of people would continue to avoid quarantine or self-isolation, and thus spread infection. LFTs – cheaper, quicker and easier to use than the more reliable polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests used at official testing sites – were a plausible part of the answer. Additionally, in a comparative international context where poor pandemic planning and a series of government omissions and miscalculations had resulted in high rates of infection and death, a mass testing programme framed by hyperbolic rhetoric was a means for the UK Government to save face (Cooper et al., 2023). Indeed, as some pointed out at the time, the relatively high number of false negative results may well have made the tests very possibly inappropriate for home use – leading to a conclusion that what was at stake was much more political posturing than any concerted attempt at pandemic management (see Bunn, 2021).

LFTs went on to become one of the truly iconic technologies of the pandemic. In many places, people became wearyingly familiar with the small rectangular bars of mostly white, and vaguely clinical, plastic, dipped in the middle to provide visual access to a results strip. This strip, in turn, was usually marked with a letter C (for control) about a third of the way down, and a T (for test) a further third of the way down. There was a pencil-tip-sized hole for the user’s saliva at one end, and a (frequently disregarded) identifying number or barcode to report the result on the other. Despite multiple manufacturers and different waves of distribution, these essentials never changed much. During peaks of infection over subsequent months, social media users’ feeds were often overtaken by friends’ and acquaintances’ images of their just-used LFTs. One red line (at C) usually produced something like wry relief, uncertainty (given the unreliability of the tests) or even joy; while the dreaded second T line, denoting a positive result, often led to a shared sense of anxiety or concern – for some, indeed, a deep and justified fear – but also, sometimes, a dark humour too.

The lateral flow test, we can say now with some perspective, has been one of the major sources through which the pandemic became quite literally known to many people, at both individual and collective scales. It was a cheap, mass-produced, visually oriented medical device; a product through which the presence (or absence) of COVID-19 became briefly legible to a population mostly with no clinical or diagnostic training. Indeed, between the saliva-hole and the thin red line(s), the test became something like what is known in Science and Technology Studies (following Bruno Latour) as a black box – an artefact in which a whole range of social and technical controversies are neatly packed away and rendered invisible. The red lines denoting the result were all that came to matter – both technically and politically (see Latour, 1987). Indeed, the visual charisma of the LFT’s signalling system (the red lines blooming and fading; sometimes appearing and disappearing as infection waxes and wanes) trades quite explicitly on this shifting, contingent relationship between what may or may not be knowable, as well as what we may be called upon to do (as both epidemiological and political actors) in the wake of that knowledge.

There is, of course, an extensive literature on the production of visual technology in science and medicine, as cinematic techniques, screen-based media, medical devices and subsequent forms of data visualisation came together to make the body and its pathologies knowable (see e.g. Cartwright, 1995; Halpern, 2014). As Lisa Cartwright among others has convincingly shown, representations of the body are now deeply entwined in the visual culture of the life sciences, as well as the very different technologies that make this culture possible. We might well analyse the LFT through this history and take it as a point from which to make sense of the visual culture of public health in a pandemic era. We might think carefully through questions of usability, shape, legibility, display and communication, to attach this performatively banal and clinical object, with its sad little paper-strip heart, to a wider literature on biomedicine’s investment in visual reason. This would, of course, be a worthwhile project – and one, indeed, likely underway somewhere as we write.

And yet, as Sue Walker, Josefina Bravo and Al Edwards make clear in their contribution to this volume (Chapter 3), these questions of the knowable and the legible, as they were embodied quite precisely in the LFT, were not at all confined to researchers in the medical or life sciences. Or, to put it otherwise: to the extent that the LFT is what the historian Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) calls an epistemic thing, a site of unknowability within a carefully constructed technical apparatus, then the people constructing that apparatus are not only people with engineering and diagnostic expertise. There are also people with deep expertise in information and communication design; in what we know about the visual organisation of text; in research on how best to illustrate the action designated by an instruction like ‘rotate’. There are people with expertise in the history and sociology of how colours work across and between cultures; in how you know whether people actually followed (or didn’t follow) an instruction in practice; in the multiple ways that bureaucratic and legal hurdles might constrain how a product could be narrated; and in the basic methodological questions of how to run a successful stakeholder workshop. Which is to say that a great deal of the technical expertise that makes the test possible is expertise that we would usually associate with ‘the humanities’ (or perhaps with the humanities and social sciences). If we are to understand the sites of technical expertise that are holding the LFT together as a diagnostic object, if we open up the black box, as Latour has it, then we will quickly find ourselves out of the laboratory and the engineering workshop, and instead in the design studio, in the participant workshop, talking to the artist, ringing the anthropologist, checking with the lawyer, or trying to find a translator. What we very quickly realise – what, indeed, was realised, in the early stages of the pandemic – is that if we want to know how well a scientific apparatus works, we don’t only need to know how reliably a red line at ‘T’ signals a true result. We need to know how real human beings – in their kitchens, surrounded by empty cereal bowls and children’s toys, under pressure to go into work, not at all used to administering their own diagnostic tests, perhaps confused and a little irritated, and likely not feeling so great – are actually going to interpret, make sense of and render knowable the lines (or lack of them) on the strip.

This relationship between humanities research and knowledge is what draws the chapters in this volume together. The authors below (and the projects they discuss) are united by a shared commitment to making the COVID-19 pandemic knowable. But they enact this commitment not in a secondary or reactive sense – for example, in historical or sociological reflection on how epidemiology or the life sciences produced knowledge of COVID – but in the primary sense of figuring out how humanities expertise can be a part of producing new knowledge on a novel infectious disease. Each chapter in this volume reports from a project that brought this expertise to bear on one or more knotty questions of what we knew or didn’t know about COVID-19 and its impact: whether this was how to communicate risks on public transport; how deafblind people were going to navigate a world without touch; how racism in the health service was likely to impact on differential exposure to illness and disease; or how people would bear, experientially, a sudden injunction to ‘stay home’. Most particularly, in the context of an official pandemic response which was frequently characterised by an inattention to, sometimes a knowing neglect of, pressing questions of complexity and justice, scholars in a number of different disciplinary contexts initiated programmes of work which set out explicitly to compensate for these epistemic, practical and ethical shortcomings. Humanities researchers, far from a relationship with crisis characterised by temporally removed attempts to make meaning, or by oblique and slow pathways to impact, have been right in the thick of things, bringing their expertise and training to bear on some of the most critical epistemic and technical questions at the heart of the pandemic. In the case of the lateral flow test – but also far more broadly – humanities research ceases to be a set of stories about meaning and experience; it is rather a set of critical, technical and rigorous procedures through which we come to know what is happening to our bodies, precisely at the moment of crisis, and according to which we might begin to take reparative (or other) action.

This transformation implies some important consequences, both for how we think about an infectious disease pandemic and how we think about the humanities. First, although COVID has been mediatised since its emergence almost exclusively as a clinical and scientific problem – think of sombre announcements by political figures flanked by senior medics, perhaps with that now over-familiar red and grey pinhead characterisation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus hovering somewhere in the background – it is now clear that this framing fundamentally misunderstood both the disease and the pandemic we would come to know. Even at the very moment of emergence, which was marked by outbreaks of anti-Chinese racism and violence in multiple places, as well as a consumer rush for scarce goods like hand sanitiser and toilet rolls, it was clear that knowing COVID – as both a pathological agent and an event – was going to require much more than medical expertise. This was partly because, far from pronouncing from a mountaintop, ‘science’ and ‘medicine’ rapidly and unwittingly reiterated themselves as messy, human activities, capable of generating as much uncertainty and ambiguity as concrete knowledge. In the UK, for example, an odd, self-appointed ‘Independent SAGE’ group established itself as a critical shadow of the government’s official Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, amid claims that the latter was untransparent and politically compromised. But the need and desire for knowledge that was more-than-medical also came from a frank awareness that the things we needed to know about COVID-19 required a different expertise and skillset; it required, for example, knowledge of the relationship between crisis, confinement and the likelihood of gender-based violence; it meant knowledge of the reasons why trying to prevent infection by deploying shame might have very bad unintended consequences; it meant knowing what happens every day in a place like a museum, or a hospital, and how people working in these institutions can sometimes play an unsung role in the production and management of public feeling.

This work necessitated a temporal shift. For scholars doing the kind of work we gather together here – which is only a small slice of the critical humanities research that took place, in a similar spirit, in and around the pandemic – interpretation and meaning were no longer operationalised in reflective mode, or when the dust settled. Rather, they were instruments for making the crisis visible and resolvable, even as it was underway. This meant not only moving from a backwards-looking reflective stance to in-the-moment knowledge production, but also a shift in the time of research itself (Baraitser and Salisbury, 2020). Making an ongoing infectious disease crisis knowable meant setting aside longstanding commitments of many in the humanities community to slow research, to sometimes painstaking textual or archival methods, to checking, double-checking and triple-checking sources, to envisioning research impact over a span of many years – and a turn instead to approaches that were often immediate, scrappy, messy. And if we don’t wish to revive, too much, a dusty cliché about slow-moving humanities professors poring over their equally dusty books (this, of course, has long been upended not least by scholars in environmental and medical humanities, in Black humanities, in computational humanities, among many other areas), we nonetheless argue that there is something distinctive about humanities researchers working in this crisis mode to make a health crisis knowable and visible, however imperfectly, with whatever tools they had to hand. This volume resists, therefore, a broader political project of devaluation aimed at the humanities; such a project, we argue, is inextricable from the governmental failures at knowledge-building – and harm reduction more broadly –that many of our chapters trace.

That last reference to tools is a reminder, finally, of another distinctive feature of these chapters, which is their relationship to methodological and technical innovation. In the chapters that follow, such innovation ranges from the use of animation to help bus passengers make sense of their exposure to the virus while getting around on public transport; to collaborating with user communities and engineers to create a wearable headset that would make a newly touchless environment perceptible to deafblind people; to using experimental film methods that foreground participation and the archiving of experience, in order to make a film that doesn’t simply record experiences of racism, but becomes a site for political action and change. What is critical here is that none of these innovations, collaborations or novel methodological decisions are made for their own sake – it’s not a facile logic of novelty that animates these projects. Rather, each chapter shows how the different authors filled the methodological gap between the expertise, knowledge and skills they had, on the one hand; and the need to make – with some rapidity – the unknowable known, on the other. This might mean drawing in new collaborators, risking a half-understood engagement with a technical object near to hand, or committing project resources (time, money, credibility) to some new technique with outputs that were, as yet, uncertain. There is here again a risk of drawing comparison with a now outmoded vision of humanities research, which in fact has been open to technological development and interdisciplinarity for some time (and indeed has been rendered open to this vision, whether it wishes it or not, by the remorseless financial and epistemic logic of the contemporary university). Nonetheless, we do want to claim that there is something distinctive in these chapters’ willingness to take often rather large methodological risks – a willingness occasioned by the unfamiliar ‘crisis’ conditions within which the research was being conducted.

Chapter 1 is a critical reflection on a series of public health films created by a research team – Charlotte Veal, Paul Hurley, Emma Roe and Sandra Wilks, in collaboration with the filmmaker, Joseph Turp – on the subject of buses as spaces of more-than-human interactions and relationships, in the context of the COVID-19 virus. Structured as a conversation between Veal and Hurley, the piece focuses on the particular challenge of sensitising users to the unseen movement of microbes, without reproducing stigmatising imaginings of buses and bus travel as inherently or newly dangerous, dirty or contaminated. Equally, as the authors make clear, the project was committed to not representing (human) passengers in ways that either positioned them as threatening or isolated them artificially from non-human worlds. Many bus users, they argue, had already been acting in ways that acknowledge – if not always fully understand – their entanglement with buses as microbial environments, even on the briefest of journeys. In the work they undertook, the problem became one of how to effectively and faithfully communicate a complex set of considerations around communal hygiene and safety, at the same time as ensuring that the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the research were uncompromised (and, indeed, developed) by the expedience of engaging audiences quickly and simply. By choosing to animate non-human elements of the bus (such as grab handles) with eyes and mouths, and overlaying short videos with conversations or monologues recorded by voice actors, the team repurposed a familiar genre for a theme more usually dominated by misleading or jarring characters and visual cues; for example, the ‘microbe monster’ favoured in advertisements for cleaning products. The seats, handles and windows which structure the environment of the bus became sites for discussion on how we are immersed in microbial worlds, and how the specific threat of COVID-19 within this immersion might be comprehended and forestalled.

In Chapter 2, Azadeh Emadi explores COVID-19 through the testimonies of deafblind people, a group for whom questions of knowledge and communication are frequently at the forefront of everyday navigation and experience. In the context of the pandemic, these questions became increasingly fraught. In the chapter, Emadi assembles a meticulous account of how their own research participants and those of their collaborators use touch to construct images and impressions of other people as well as their physical surroundings. This includes heightened attention to particular sources of information – such as the vibration of feet on a pavement – going far further than a logic of compensation, but instead opening up worlds of perception routinely disregarded by sighted people. With the problem of ‘knowing’ already seriously in contention, and with significant and systemic pre-existing barriers to relational health very much in place, COVID-19 and its responses structured deafblind people’s experiences of public space in unsettling and disorienting ways. How did new rules around social distancing, for example, impact on interactions where touch had previously been key? How did altered uses of space – and an altered spatial relationship with other people – interrupt and distort the tangible and knowable world? Within these questions, Emadi outlines a challenge that moves across and beyond the peculiar circumstances of the pandemic: how to work with deafblind people to create a new technology of perception; in this case, a wearable headset or ‘Touch Tool’ which uses radar to process the immediate environment into information accessible to deafblind users. The aim of the Touch Tool is to offer an unobtrusive enhancement to the mosaic of impressions that the project’s participants use to visualise objects and people in their surroundings. Research in the humanities, this chapter shows, can be crucial to the development of novel sensory innovations; in making the everyday experiences of deafblind people more problematic, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped provide the rationale for technology with the potential to be genuinely transformative.

Chapter 3 addresses a related but different set of questions around interactions with technology, asking how devices which rapidly became commonplace in the pandemic – in this instance, home (or workplace) lateral flow test (LFT) kits to indicate the presence of viral load – have been used, communicated and understood. Applying evidence from a panel of users and best-practice principles in communication design to the instructions that accompany LFTs, Sue Walker, Josefina Bravo and Al Edwards identify a crucial tension in what comprises ‘good’ instructions. Regulatory frameworks, the authors note, require compulsory information to be communicated alongside tests; the forms these communications take, however, are shaped by requirements (such as liability management) which are unnecessary for, and at times constraining of, the aim of relating easily comprehensible instructions quickly to almost anyone. ‘Good’ instructions, here, are a category very much open to contestation and nuance, and the authors assemble a powerful case for what testing instructions rooted in knowledge of how people actually process and respond to those instructions might look like. In some respects, this chapter crystallises one of the central contentions of the volume (and, indeed, the wider series). Amid repeated references to ‘following the science’ (and statements on the scale of their success), politicians lauded (and extensively funded) mass testing programmes. While enumerations of ‘tests distributed’ or ‘tests traced’ were key markers of political value, the unknown – and unknowable – figure of ‘tests taken correctly’ exerts a greater claim to salience. This figure is contingent, to a considerable degree, on how instructions were communicated and received; and understanding, critiquing and improving these processes is a matter requiring expertise from the arts and humanities. If, as the authors assert, there is likely to be a significant legacy of relatively simple tests taken by laypeople in non-clinical settings (processes already underway, for example, in the management of chronic illness), then the questions they identify here, on how such tests are demonstrated and explained – and how users, consequently, will engage with them – are of decisive importance.

At stake here are questions of communication, which are also a focus for Alison Blunt, Kathy Burrell, Georgina Endfield, Miri Lawrence, Eithne Nightingale, Alastair Owens, Jacqueline Waldock and Annabelle Wilkins, who take as their point of departure the UK Government’s injunction to ‘stay home’, a public health strategy mirrored in a number of international contexts. What kind of home, Chapter 4 provokes us to ask, did these injunctions imagine? And how were homes inhabited or dwelled within, both easily and uneasily, not just as (largely) private households, but as wider emotional geographies which take in streets, neighbourhoods and public spaces? Making extensive use of testimonies taken from a diverse group of participants across the cities of Liverpool and London, the authors analyse how different people in different contexts connected with their surroundings in new ways, developing a firmer sense of place; how they negotiated feelings of loneliness that were rooted to the materiality and geography of home, transforming what might have previously been positive emotions around solitary living; how migration made room for attachments to multiple ‘homes’, with new barriers to mobility during COVID-19 imposing conflicting feelings of belonging and homesickness; how (even just visual) access to greenery and bodies of water made seclusion more bearable; and how racist attributions of the spread of disease pulled relatively secure feelings of home into crisis. In creating the conditions for home-workers, unemployed people and people on furlough to speak back to the injunction to ‘stay home’, the authors work towards a speculative and capacious idea of what home is and could be, in and for public health. In so doing, this chapter suggests that the diversity, complexity and inequity of experiences of home have to be taken seriously in future public health messages and interventions. Responses to new crises which rely on a homogenised and sanitised vision of home, and which ask us to ‘stay home’ without any deeper interrogation of what that might mean, will be insufficient to address both primary and secondary sources of harm.

Chapter 5 moves beyond our focus – broadly on technology and communication – up to this point, alighting on the specific context of the museum sector to untangle the role of emotions about and at work in the particular challenges faced by managers, curators, visitor guides and front-of-house staff. While this is in part an analysis of sectoral adaptation and adversity, Elizabeth Crooke and David Farrell-Banks, focusing empirically on Northern Ireland, move between macro- and microscopic lenses, using oral testimonies to explore complex emotional, political, economic and social situations and processes (such as furlough, precarity and shifting professional identities). COVID-19, the authors argue, exposed deep and long fissures in the museum sector; both individual and institutional priorities were crystallised by the pressures of shifting museums from physical to online spaces, collecting pandemic artefacts as a direct act of history-making and memorialisation, and continuing to offer formal and informal systems of care to audiences and staff. For Crooke and Farrell-Banks, the emotional attachment that museum staff had to their work – though not an unclouded phenomenon – acted primarily as a protective factor in navigating professional, personal and political changes and uncertainties. A renewed sense of purpose, too, could work against the nexus of painful emotions, such as loneliness, fear, anxiety and grief, which were wider products of the pandemic and the UK Government’s preparedness and response. Amid attempts by the workers they interview to assemble a collective archive of the pandemic, Crooke and Farrell-Banks take the processes of collection and curation – and the welter of emotions, experiences and feelings that surround them – as the subject of their own project of preservation, ensuring that they are not simply allowed to fade from view.

Where earlier – and later – chapters in this volume address the novel context of COVID-19, Lesley Murray, Amanda Holt and Jessica Moriarty’s Chapter 6 repositions our understanding of crisis in relation to the pandemic, posing it instead as a watershed moment in bringing previously ignored stories of suffering to the surface. The authors argue that the much-reported spike in gender-based violence (GBV) at the beginning of the pandemic allows for a more widespread – but still partial – questioning of whom GBV narratives exclude and make invisible. With GBV against women over the age of 50 frequently (mis)categorised as elder abuse (a conceptual framework that, the authors argue, misses important nuances in gender, power and mobility), this chapter identifies a narrative vacuum around older victims of GBV, with serious cultural, individual and legal consequences. While their broader research mobilises creative methodologies to encourage such stories to emerge, Murray, Holt and Moriarty’s contribution to this volume focuses on two composite narratives of women in their eighties, assembled from multiple testimonies collected by the charity AGE UK. These stories draw together complex themes of abuse, control and constraint, first in a long narrative of physical and emotional violence over 57 years of marriage, and secondly in a shorter scenario of an abusive adult child returned to the family home. With COVID-19 present as the catalyst for these stories (but not their context), we can only speculate on how these dynamics might have contorted or sharpened, as – among a number of other determinants which make GBV more likely – physical proximity was increasingly enforced. Murray, Holt and Moriarty’s chapter can also be read as a companion piece to Chapter 4 on the subject of home; indeed, it would be hard to draw out how the vision of home-as-sanctuary implicit in public health communications could be more strikingly subverted and compromised.

The problem of finding ways to preserve and communicate experiences which might otherwise have been rendered invisible is also a major focus of Anandi Ramamurthy and Ken Fero’s Chapter 7 on ‘obstinate memory’. Reflecting on the theories and methods behind their 2022 documentary, Exposed, on Black, Brown and migrant nurses and midwives’ experiences of racism, the authors show how longer histories of racism in the National Health Service (NHS) were reformulated within the specific contingencies of COVID-19. Exposure, here, takes on several meanings: in the ways that racialisation contributed to how health workers were put in the way of viral and psychological harm; in the value of a ‘documentary of force’ approach in bringing such harms to light; and in the vulnerability of telling painful stories, and being cast in the difficult role of complainant. By attending closely to pasts and futures, Ramamurthy and Fero add new dimensions to what – at least for readers of other chapters in this volume – will be an increasingly familiar story. In their nuanced and perceptive piece, the COVID-19 pandemic stands not as something wholly new, but as a crisis which has landed in ways that follow deep and wide fault lines that were already well established in the UK in 2019. Anti-racist humanities work, their research attests, is sorely needed in the present: to untangle how structural racism (and the systemic devaluation of Black and Brown lives) plays out in specific institutional cultures and contexts, becoming encoded in responses to new emergencies and disasters. Their research also shows the power of creating an archive for, and a documentary to convey, testimonies which show precisely how this has occurred, in order to work backwards against racist exposure to multiple harms in future iterations of an NHS both in and out of crisis. Obstinate memory, this chapter suggests, is a technique not just of recognition, but of survival.

Chapter 8 in this volume, Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose’s essay on vaccine shaming, also takes sight at how particular lives and deaths have been invested with varying degrees of value (Fred Cooper is additionally an editor of the present volume, and an author of this introduction). Although there is a shared border here – vaccine uptake has usually been lower in racialised groups, in part because of a historical (and understandable) lack of trust in medical interventions and services – this chapter is concerned with acute (rather than chronic) dynamics of shame and marginalisation. What happens, the authors ask, when a shamed population is rapidly brought into being, specifically around non-conformity to public health initiatives; when members of that group are subsequently held accountable for a raft of negative outcomes (high infection and mortality rates, ongoing restrictions to everyday life and their own suffering and death); and when a crisis or disaster is publicly seen to be primarily affecting people who share culpability for their own illness? Bringing their research on shame and shaming into close proximity with Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s work on grievability, Cooper, Dolezal and Rose explore how shameful deaths are created and discussed, and the kinds of political decisions and omissions they make possible. COVID-19, they argue, significantly raised the stakes on vaccine ‘hesitancy’ and ‘refusal’, with public health communications on vaccination often heightening the burden of shame. In this context, internet users made new, ‘anti-persuasive’ forums, in the form of online spaces to shame and deride notable anti-vaxxers who had subsequently contracted COVID-19 and died, assembling in the process an accidental archive of the experience of dying of the disease. Beyond the immediate context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter sensitises us to the complex workings of shame, and the damaging consequences of public health messaging which sets out to leverage this difficult emotion. Future pandemics will require mass vaccination programmes, and not everyone will co-operate. Likewise, other emergencies will be inflected with differing valuations of life. As normative judgements over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour are heightened, shame is likely to play a significant part.

The chapters that follow are in some ways a record of what it meant to do humanities research at a moment of crisis – to, in some cases, wholly re-orient an existing research agenda towards an as-yet-uncovered piece of the pandemic puzzle. There will be space in the years ahead for thinking more carefully – perhaps more critically – about the epistemic politics of this moment, and the inevitable instrumentalisation of research agendas that it entailed. In this volume, however, and in its companions, we want to make space for recording the rigorous epistemological force of the humanities during COVID-19. While the focus of this series of volumes has necessarily been on work (primarily) taking place in the humanities, for reasons detailed at length in the preface, it nonetheless takes sight at disciplinary practices with fluid and porous borders, and resonance far beyond the spaces they originated in; most notably, we suspect, for scholarship in public health and science and technology studies. This is a diverse and eclectic set of chapters pitched at a broad readership, intended to provide a frame of reference for research on COVID-19 – and emerging or ongoing crises and their epistemologies – well into the future. At a time of ongoing political and bureaucratic attack – as we write, some hundreds of humanities colleagues in the UK alone are under threat of redundancy, while early career colleagues are casually tossed aside – this volume also stands as a testament to what humanities research can do, what it does do, acknowledging the expertise, care and skill that scholars in philosophy, literature studies, history, media, human geography and so many other areas used to make the pandemic knowable.

References

Baraitser, L. and Salisbury, L. (2020), ‘Containment, delay, mitigation’: Waiting and care in the time of a pandemic [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. Wellcome Open Research, 5(129). doi: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.15970.2
Bunn, S. (2021), Mass testing for COVID-19: January update on lateral flow tests, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Available at: https://post.parliament.uk/mass-testing-for-covid-19-january-update-on-lateral-flow-tests/ (accessed 8 May 2023).
Cartwright, L. (1995), Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Cooper, F., Dolezal, L. and Rose, A. (2023), Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK. London: Bloomsbury.
Halpern, O. (2014), Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Latour, B. (1987), Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997), Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Knowing COVID- 19

The pandemic and beyond

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