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For many people alive today, the COVID-19 pandemic created a new way of life different to anything they had previously experienced. Yet these new realities – social distancing, quarantine, protective masks, job loss, education disruption, anxiety, loneliness and death, among so many others, have been part of many peoples’ lives in pandemics – and epidemics – across time and global space. The Spanish flu of 1918 is a well-known example, as is the black death of 1346-1353. This course addresses the ties that bind, and ruptures between, experiences of pandemics. In so doing, we bring three specific lenses and sets of methods to bear – those of literature, anthropology, and philosophy. Approaches will hone skill sets including analysis, argumentation, close reading, and comparative thinking. Themes that will be weaved throughout the course are those of care, resources, and knowledge production. Care of patients, families, local and global values; Resources of medical interventions, social connection, political structures, and financial means; Knowledge produced through science, narrative, myth, metaphor, and argument.

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