With the spread of the novel coronavirus and its attendant COVID-19 outbreak, social and behavioral science is being deployed to assuage fears, understand risk, improve public health and implement social distancing strategies. These articles and resources seek to assist in that educational effort.
On October 9, a free online symposium will bring together social and behavioral science researchers in the United States whose work can inform public policies related to the pandemic with policymakers and public servants who are crafting and enacting legislation and other responses to COVID-19.
As COVID-19 forces the world in into a predominately digital state, censorship and the spread of misinformation have not been far behind. Our experiences […]
From the budding sense of a tight-knit community of fellow students and faculty, to radio silence, for a lot of students the rapid coronavirus-driven shift to a digital university experience doesn’t feel like enough. I am one of those students — a current graduate student who recently moved back home to America to finish up the last year of a dual-degree program.
As the toll from the COVID-19 pandemic increased, polling suggests counter-intuitively that resistance to a future vaccine has also risen. Anthropologist Heidi J. Larson identified several likely drivers of this, including scientists themselves.
COVID-19 has devastated communities and economies around the world and profoundly changed the ways in which we live and work. […]
After a rapid switch to distance education due to COVID-19, many universities will remain as virtual campuses in the coming fall semester. For many universities, the focus has been on mastering or refining techniques for remote teaching. But a larger challenge looms.
This week, almost 60 learned societies, associations and higher-education serving groups signed onto an open letter that argues “humanistic education and scholarship must remain central to campus communities and conversations.”
Women are facing additional constraints as a result of COVID-19. These range from the added burdens and responsibilities of working from home, through to the fact that fewer women scientists are being quoted as experts on COVID-19, all the way to far fewer women being part of the cohort producing new knowledge on the pandemic.
The management of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the hollowness of that alternative in policies that have been made by people with very narrow life experiences and imposed on others with whom there is, as Disraeli once said, ‘no intercourse and no sympathy’.
Having locked ourselves into a particular way of thinking and acting in relation to COVID-19, argues Robert Dingwall, it is very difficult for this to be questioned – but it must not go unchallenged if we are to balance the moral goals of medicine with the other moral goals that make up a good society.
As universities start to imagine a post-pandemic future, they are faced with a choice – to simply return to the way things were, or embrace this opportunity to change assessment for good.
Of course the government should have a Plan B for a second wave. But this might also be a moment to ask where pandemic management is taking us.
