Humanities and the coronavirus crisis: a call for their role in public health. From the editorial:

… I’ve seen firsthand the valuable role that the humanities can play in public health. More than a decade after finishing my Ph.D. in American studies, I went back to school to pursue a master of public health degree. I was motivated by something I had observed through my own research: a huge gap between public health as an applied practice and public health as an object of historical and theoretical work in the humanities. Public health fieldworkers, for the most part, weren’t reading humanities research, and humanities scholars weren’t focused on the current demands of health communication. As a result, neither side was benefiting from the expertise of the other, and common causes were going unrecognized….

… [H]umanities scholars can contribute to the current pandemic: by engaging in long-term, big-picture research that brings humanities questions to bear on public health. This kind of work provides critical historical and cultural context and can broaden the perspectives of public health and medical trainees….

This brings us to a second way that the humanities can be part of a pandemic response: through front-line, immediate translational work. The current outbreak has revealed some alarming weaknesses in our public health infrastructure, and we desperately need research to develop fast, cheap field test kits, ventilators and vaccines. But research in the medical humanities has long shown that health cannot be attained and illness cannot be vanquished through biomedical or technical interventions alone. This pandemic has made the human fragility of our response infrastructure abundantly clear, and we need to understand how our decisions about whose life matters will shape the future to come….

Becoming part of the front-line response may also require expanding the scope of our research projects, as we reimagine the audience for the work. We should be training our students to do the same. Participating in the pandemic response requires robust, sustained, long-term dialogue with intended publics beyond the academy, and most critically, it demands that we incorporate their needs into the formulation of research topics.

h/t Robert Townsend (@rbthisted)

For other posts on this theme, see here.