Corona Times is a blog written and curated by engaged scholars from across the world, coming together across multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, with a strong grounding in humanities and social sciences, and in dialogue with public health knowledge. The blog is a public engagement project of HUMA, the Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with academics at the University of Agder (Norway), University of Johannesburg (South Africa), Nordic Africa Institute (Sweden), Vassar College (New York), and Karolinska Institutet (Sweden). Our advisory board members are affiliated to institutions across Africa, Europe, Asia, North America and Latin America.
In this moment of global crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we need sober, grounded, empathetic, politically minded scholarly voices that can help people and governments to understand what we are going through, why we are where we are today, and where we might be going.
While our scientific knowledge of Covid-19 is growing, much is still unknown about the virus' epidemiological but also social, political and economic dimensions. We know it kills and that many people are experiencing prolonged serious illness as a result of infection. People’s health and lives are at stake, all around the world. The unknowns are still of such magnitude that the risk of adopting laissez faire public health and economic responses is just too high. The virus leaves nobody and nothing untouched, and it is brutally equalising in its infliction of suffering and death, affecting all countries, classes, ethnicities and genders. Yet the elderly, those with more vulnerable health, people of colour and people struggling with poverty and discrimination are much more affected than others. The pandemic affects everybody, but with highly unequal outcomes both within and across countries.
As the death toll increases and the negative economic effects deepen, there is no certain timeline about when a vaccine might be ready. We don't know when we will be able to do away with current measures of containment. The social sciences and the humanities are badly needed, but the concept of scientific authority itself needs to be moulded and adapted to the current times. We have a responsibility to be authoritative and use our authority responsibly, but are not in a position to make final statements with the arrogance of those who know with certainty what needs to be done.
We offer detailed, rigorously researched, ethical expert commentary that humbly explores ways to grasp the various facets of the current moment, and proposes ways forward and evaluates social, economic and public health interventions on multiple temporal scales, from the short-term to the long view.
In this time of social distancing and necessary physical withdrawal from "business as usual", we also hope to go “out there” with our minds and spirits, to nurture the intellectual conviviality and human companionship that we need to fight the pandemic and get through the other side stronger and more resilient.
The current crisis is showing the enormous limitations of an exploitative neoliberal order that favours the abstract workings of markets over people’s lives, but also the short-sightedness of narrow nationalist responses that ignore and dismiss data and experiences from other countries, periods and ideologies because “it is not us”. The physical enclosures that the fight against the pandemic is producing will only work if they are inspired by open minds that travel across all kinds of separations, borders and walls. Ideas and practices of unchecked individualist freedoms to consume and freedom to infect in the name of freedom, are also proving to be destructive and anti-humanist.
To rediscover our interconnectedness and conviviality in these times of existential crisis and biological precarity, we need to rethink and remould ideas of freedom, responsibility and interdependence, by appreciating that being with and for others, and knowing how and when to restrain ourselves are also fundamental freedoms that nurture individuals and societies.
You can contact us at editorial@coronatimes.net
CHIEF EDITOR
Vito Laterza, University of Agder, Norway & University of Johannesburg, South Africa
EDITORIAL TEAM
Divine Fuh, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Mwenya Mubanga, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden
Patience Mususa, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden
Lauren Paremoer, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Louis Philippe Römer, Vassar College, US
COPYEDITORS
Carli Coetzee, Editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies
Crystal Powell
ADVISORY BOARD
Olumide Abimbola, German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ), Germany
Parfait Akana, Muntu Institute/University of Yaounde II, Cameroon
Tomohiro AKIYAMA, Sophia University, Japan
Julie Soleil Archambault, Concordia University, Canada
Noman Baig, Habib University, Pakistan
Antonadia Borges, University of Brasilia, Brazil
Fanny Chabrol, Centre for Population and Development (CEPED), France
Rama Salla Dieng, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Ignasio Jimu, National Council for Higher Education, Malawi
Carl Manlan, Ecobank Foundation, Togo
Jordanna Matlon, American University, Washington DC, USA
Beatriz Mesa, International University of Rabat, Morocco
Aïdas Sanogo, Centre Universitaire de Manga, Burkina Faso
Nelusha Shunmoogam, Malaysia
Bian Simei, Sichuan University, China
A.R. Vasavi, PUNARCHITH Collective, Karnataka, India
Rachid ID YASSINE, Université Gaston Berger, Senegal
Henri-Michel Yéré, University of Basel, Switzerland