Day: June 11, 2020

by Institute for Policy, Ethics and Culture (IPEC)

All of us in the University community have been deeply submerged into a world dominated by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Several months into responding to this health crisis, many parts of our lives have been challenged, disrupted and changed. The shock, dislocation and sometimes despair people feel are often not explicitly health related, but result from encountering aspects of the crisis that, while seemingly peripheral, are actually integral to this new “pandemic culture.” IPEC members have been discussing the reach of this crisis into almost every aspect of our lives and we want to make available to you what is also “in crisis” as seen from our various areas of expertise in policy, ethics, and culture.

To address this, we began the “1,000 words project,” in which we asked IPEC members to explore the nature of the crisis, dislocations and challenges as they see it from their unique perspectives. To date, we have pieces that consider changes to social relations and physical distance, the crisis of resistance to expertise, the challenge of math communication, the impact of science denialism, emerging challenges in marketing, the significance of trust, and the ethical perspectives that guide responses to the crisis.