![\"Costlow](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2020\/01\/191104_Jane_Costlow_Ross_Gay_Otis_Lecture_0305-1.jpg\")
<\/a>\r\nIn that way, the pandemic reminded Costlow of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which was a topic of that class discussion. In the midst of the pandemic, she said, we’re \u201cfar away from having a sense of a beginning, a middle, and an end.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Costlow is not the only member of the Bates faculty who is watching COVID-19 and wondering what it has to teach us in terms of what we believe, how we feel and respond, and how we get along. Meet a few more:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Stephanie Kelley-Romano, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies<\/h5>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
For Kelley-Romano, a rhetoric scholar known for her research into conspiracy theories, the noise around COVID-19 may be too much of a professional opportunity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nConspiracy theorizing is as old as humanity, but \u201cwhat\u2019s most different about COVID-19 is the audience,\u201d Kelley-Romano says. \u201cWe\u2019re all stuck at home, all on lockdown, and that’s around the world. And we have this \u2018infodemic,\u2019 this glut of information about the virus.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cOf course, people want to know what causes it, what could potentially prevent or cure it, where did it start, why is it here?\u201d \u2014 questions that are like an open cash register to the conspiracy spinners. \u201cAnd what’s different is that we’re all just available to look on our phones for obscene amounts of time.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Another difference is the universal reach of the virus. \u201cWhen we have something that so broadly affects all members of our community in such dramatic ways, it really shakes people up and makes the grasping for information to anchor ourselves more desperate,\u201d Kelley-Romano says.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Which primes people to believe things that, in normal times, they would reject as ridiculous. \u201cAnd the degree to which people stay engaged on the internet with news seems to me to be inversely proportionate to their actual emotional health,\u201d she adds. In short, she advises, limit your screen time and don’t share conspiracy theories, even just for laughs.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
From a Chinese lab being the origin of the virus, to 5G cell phone technology being a vector for it, to cow urine as a cure for it, the pandemic has produced a bumper crop of conspiracy theorizing. Unless she’s working and deliberately thinking about politics and rhetoric, Kelley-Romano finds it helpful to filter her consumption of mainstream news. \u201cI do that only when I cook meals and I’m semi-distracted. I just trust that what I get will be enough.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Lillian Nayder, Professor of English<\/h5>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cLike so many of the people around us, writers and artists are responding to the pandemic with creativity and with compassion,\u201d Nayder says. \u201cLiterary representations will no doubt help us to understand the inequities and injustices underscored by the pandemic, as well as the connections that it has fostered and exposed.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Looking ahead, she continues, \u201cscholars who study \u2018the literature of COVID-19\u2019 will help us grasp the meanings of the disease in cultural, social, and artistic terms \u2014 meanings which are already emerging in the medical context of the disease and our efforts to contain it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
<\/a>\r\nNayder\u2019s own teaching models that scholarly imperative. Her two courses that examine relationships among literature, empathy, and medicine, she says, are \u201cclosely tied to our current crisis and our ways of responding to it \u2014 not only in terms of the panic and anxiety generated by the pandemic, but also in terms of the creativity, narrative and otherwise, that it is inspiring.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
\u201cIn particular, the humanity \u2014 and the vulnerability \u2014 of medical practitioners who have stories to tell about their patients, themselves, and their families have really come to the forefront.<\/p>\r\n
“These stories of loss, of suffering, of sacrifice, recovery, and love foreground the power and value of what we are calling \u2018the medical humanities,\u2019 and our understanding of our own corporeality more generally as well.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
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Nayder follows The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 continuing portraits of people touched by COVID-19, \u201cas well as the political dimensions of the pandemic,\u201d she says.<\/p>\r\n \u201cAnd, of course, I’m learning from the stories and experiences that my students are relaying as we’ve been meeting remotely\u201d for her course \u201cThe Arctic Sublime,\u201d which looks at 19th-century perceptions of the Arctic \u2014 a literature \u201cwith its own representations of fear, physical duress, and feelings of awe.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n As events unfold, Nayder continues, \u201cmy questions involve the ideas of \u2018normalcy\u2019 that the pandemic has raised: What is \u2018normal\u2019? When and how \u2014 and should \u2014 we return to it?\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n \u201cMy research is on disaster,\u201d Shepard says bluntly. Specifically, this New Orleans native examines the impact of settler colonialism \u2014 the systematic replacement of an existing population with settlers from away \u2014 on the rebuilding of her home town after Hurricane Katrina.<\/p>\r\n (Long after the 2005 storm and subsequent flooding, many longtime NOLA residents were stranded in cities where they\u2019d taken refuge, clearing the way for a variety of new people \u2014 colonizers, really \u2014 to take their places.)<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n \u201cI think about settler colonialism as a disaster,\u201d Shepard explains. \u201cAnd as a matter of fact, I consider it the disaster that creates more disaster.\u201d<\/p>\r\n In August 2005, New Orleans residents, hauling what belongings they can, line up to enter the Superdome in advance of Hurricane Katrina. (Marty Bahamonde\/FEMA)<\/p><\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n In other words, the legacies of racial, economic, and civic injustice left by settler colonialism constitute a slow-motion, mundane kind of misery that gets noticed only when a more-newsy catastrophe comes to call.<\/p>\r\n Cassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana. (Marshanda Smith)<\/p><\/div>\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n \u201cThe things that we think are disastrous are really just an additional cataclysm,\u201d she says. \u201cWe’re already existing in a state of disaster \u2014 I would consider it perpetual disaster. Then we get a spike, an unusual cataclysm \u2014 that could be a hurricane, that could be coronavirus, it could be different things\u2026.These spikes really reveal what was already there.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n Shepard sees strong parallels between a phenomenon like COVID-19 and the dominance in recent decades of so-called neoliberalism, the privileging of private-sector over public interests in government activity.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n COVID-19, similarly to neoliberalism, \u201cperpetuates inequality,\u201d Shepard says.<\/p>\r\n \u201cWe see how hard it’s hitting communities of color,\u201d as well as unemployed, precariously employed, and undocumented workers \u2014 people ineligible for stimulus funds even though they may be doing work that’s now considered essential. \u201cThe people who were the most vulnerable are still the most vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\n In New Orleans’ 9th Ward, houses and automobiles are in piles after Hurricane Katrina. (Photograph by Infrogmation)<\/p><\/div>\r\n <\/p>\r\n A disaster like the coronavirus places a certain obligation on scholars like Shepard. \u201cOne of the ways that we can show people that what we’re doing is valuable to their reality today is by engaging with disaster and showing what people don’t know,\u201d she says \u2014 \u201chelping people to make sense of what’s happening around them.\u201d<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n Wiesinger has conducted extensive research into the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster in Japan’s T\u014dhoku region. Specifically, she studies how that catastrophe and others are represented in film and theater (indirectly inspired by the T\u014dhoku events, her play Waters Rise<\/em> premiered in 2019).<\/p>\r\nCassandra Shepard, Visiting Assistant Professor of Africana<\/h5>\r\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a>Justine Wiesinger, Assistant Professor of Japanese<\/h5>\r\n