Archiving the Pandemic

CES (com)vida 2020

Engaging the Pandemic

Mark Nichter

Anthropology News

Overview

Mark Nichter points out strategies for an engaged social scientist, unfolding some practical contributions that could be implemented during the confinement. With dual training in anthropology and public health, his exercises consisted of increasing public understanding of COVID-19; highlighting what medical anthropology could bring to pandemic research; engaging, as a university lecturer, with COVID-19 working groups in an effort to protect staff and students in their return to work; and responding to what he saw as a gap in the response to the pandemic - the practical support to health professionals and their families as risk groups, highlighting the role we all have, as interconnected elements of a community in "caring for others”. If society is to trust science, it must collaborate in the reforms that the world demands, starting right next door.