Overview

Pandemic Research for the People is a U.S.-born project of the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps - an independent group of scientists, educators and farmers based in central United States - to promote, conduct and share research to address the needs of communities around the world facing the pandemic and crisis. Its goal is to rescue ongoing research in different fields from its submission to the goal of preserving a political economy tied to capitalism and its forms of exploitation, which produces the problems it allegedly seeks to respond to. This research should serve to respond to the problems of those most directly affected by the pandemic and the crisis. To fulfil this objective, the project brings together a group of researchers/activists from different areas and with diverse experiences, organising themselves into six working groups, producing and sharing collaborative and participatory research/intervention initiatives. One of the main contributors to the project is Rob Wallace, a phytogeographer and expert on epidemics and pandemics of viral origin and the ecological and political-economic conditions of their emergence and proliferation, with important contributions to the understanding of the current pandemic.