Sociologist Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, is an expert on the intersection of race, inequality, science, and technology. During the COVID-19 outbreak, she created the #CoronavirusSyllabus, a crowdsourced list of resources that sheds light on the social implications of the pandemic. In conversation with Joanne Lipman, the Peretsman Scully Distinguished Journalism Fellow, she discusses the syllabus and the coronavirus’s impact on society:
Joanne Lipman: What’s the purpose of a Coronavirus Syllabus?
Alonda Nelson: You might recall there was a Ferguson Syllabus (see sidebar), a prior social media endeavor by other scholars a few years ago intended to help the general public understand the broader social and historical context for the wave of U.S. protests about police violence.
Like that time, this is a moment of shock and disorientation. But scholars have this unique vantage: this exact thing hasn’t happened before, but something not dissimilar has happened before. These are some resources to help you contextualize this moment even if it is in some ways unprecedented.
JL: How did you decide to create the syllabus?
AN: One unexpected consequence of social distancing is that there’s quite a lot of writing about COVID-19, but it is quick writing about the contemporary moment. A mentor and friend on Twitter said, People should be teaching the virus. And I thought well, why don’t we start a syllabus that provides more depth and context? My areas of research are in the sociology of science and technology, and also the sociology of race. So I knew that there was a lot of scholarly literature to help us contextualize this time.
There can be a comfort in taking a step back to remember that we had to deal with quarantines and the social implications of infectious disease in the past. It helps to make sense of the world.
JL: Is it for a general audience, or for an academic audience?
AN: It is intended for a lay audience. We’ve really gone out of our way to make sure there are items on the syllabus that are open access. This is a crowdsourced effort.
2020 Institute for Advanced Study