Politics of the Pandemic

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course uses the ongoing pandemic caused by COVID-19 as a point of departure to reflect on the politics of pandemics. We will complicate our received anthropocentric view of pandemics with an appreciation of the ways in which humans cohabit the planet with other species, including microbes, that remake each other over time. The very idea of being “human” may rest on the presence of non-human actors working in and around us. Dissolving the nature/culture divide that mars much historical and social-scientific thinking, we shall rethink what pandemics mean on a planet that homo sapiens seek relentlessly to subjugate for itself.