About this project

The pandemic which has swept across the world is at once a crisis of public health and of human relationships. It cannot be considered apart from reaction to it by states and other actors. Both the virus and the response are of a scale and speed not matched in living memory. Across the world, this has upended everyday life and is testing the limits of human organization, socially, economically and politically.

The pandemic is testing the way in which knowledge and knowledge-makers have structured the universe of the academy and, indeed, its every purpose. This is because the pandemic presents immediate challenges to intellectual understanding and, as importantly, its practical relevance.

New possibilities and challenges, new portals and politics lie before us.

This engagement by Thesis Eleven looks to begin in the real-time of its making and unfolding, set against deeper reflection, looking forward, with critical theories, and back, with historical sociologies. The materials we publish here will be set for 12 months, and added to as developments unfold. After a year we will revisit these materials, and publish some in Thesis Eleven or in a book, offering writers the opportunity to rethink or revisit.

Areas of possible interest indicated to our writers and artists include the following, but are not limited to them:

1. How does the pandemic challenge both academic understandings and practical processes of globalization, including in its relationship to nations and nationalism, to ideas of a ‘risk society’, to understanding of global cooperation and its failures, to the interplay of social relations with technology and markets, to intellectual collaboration itself?

2. How does the virus challenge theories of (or complacency about) democracy?

3. What does the pandemic/response couplet reveal about inequality and power, inside nation-states and across countries in regional and global contexts?

4. How does the urgency of response to coronavirus relate to other urgent concerns, from climate change to the plight of refugees? And how can this intellectual work inform practical action (or why does it seem often to fail)?

5. How should academics orient their work to possible futures in the face of the pandemic? How well do conventional academic habits and institutions support the needed engagement with possibility rather than certainty, and normative judgments alongside empirical observations?

6. What are the shock effects of this crisis for thinking about everyday life? How has the pandemic caused us to imagine everyday life differently?

Our purpose will be to publish the thoughts (and lived-experience) of a span of authors from different countries and cultural/political contexts as well as different intellectual perspectives. These pieces can take one of two formats: longer pieces; and shorter postcard-type vignettes or essays (including photo essays).

The coordinators of this special project are Peter Vale, Craig Calhoun, Peter Beilharz, Sian Supski, Andrew Gilbert and Tim Andrews.