About the Project – Pandemics: Past, Present and Future

Pandemics: Past, Present and Future

Societies around the globe are in the midst of grappling with the broad-scale impacts of Covid-19. To truly understand the consequences of this global medical emergency and attempt to mitigate some of its most devastating effects requires not only scientific and medical expertise, but understandings of human relations, including social interactions, political decision-making, the ethical dimensions of health and medical care, historical precedents and anomalies, and cultural and artistic expressions of unity and divergence, suffering and resilience.

The “Pandemics – Past, Present, and Future” research hub draws together the expertise of more than 30 academic staff from the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Arts to examine these issues. Composed of medical anthropologists, economists, and historians, policy experts and poets, government ethics advisors and media scholars, the network brings together researchers from the Faculty of Arts’ schools of humanities, cultures, languages and linguistics, and the social sciences, as well as allied networks and institutions. Its purpose is to create forums for collaboratively engaging in understanding and responding to past and present pandemics as well as planning for pandemic futures.