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“We’re all in this together,” proclaim many Americans in this time of the global covid-19 pandemic. One meme displays the word VIRUS with the letters VIR marked out, highlighting US. The solidarity slogan is printed below, followed by “We are coronavirus.” But who are ‘we’, ‘us’? Whose experiences get erased to ensure that ‘all’ are […]
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As someone who thinks and writes about how speculative fiction helps us to navigate the ways that science and technology shape daily life, I regularly encounter proclamations that we are “living in a science fictional world.” Generally, this sentiment describes something like self-driving cars or the gene-editing possibilities of CRISPR technology—things that once seemed the […]
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A viral pandemic is spidering across the globe, and so too is an emotional one. Fears and anxieties spread and mutate in whispered late-night conversations and flashing updates, working their own damage on bodies and minds. There is deep fear of the virus itself, of course, and fear as well of its economic impact. The current crisis has rendered the economic laws that govern […]
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Living Lockdown as an academic historian has meant learning a great deal, and fast. There was the move to online teaching and student support, meetings to plan the first academic year with social isolation, and helping to keep research – and the training of historians – alive and meaningful. Like so many others it seems […]
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As the scope and intensity of the coronavirus pandemic became more terribly apparent, and as I like so many others hunkered down at home and tried to get my head around these new and frightening conditions, I first looked around for books and texts that spoke more directly to the situation. Like so many others, […]
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In times of crisis, when people experience fear, they often express hostility toward others. They discriminate against people who look like “enemies”. The well-known and shameful internment of Japanese-Americans in World War 2 is such a case. The discrimination against German-Americans in World War 1 was similar. Unlike Japanese-Americans, German-Americans didn’t look much different from […]
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I gaze at the vista outside my study window and absorb the splendor of spring. We have been sheltering in place for eight weeks now. I trace the lush horizon marked by swaying trees and the tender green of the leaves on that one tree that sheds its leaves every Fall. No sign here of […]
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Last autumn, I ran a course at the University of Hong Kong on “The Ecological Imagination in Film and Literature”. On the first day, I looked around the spotless, climate-controlled classroom and asked, “How many living things are in here with us?” The class seemed puzzled. As smart graduate students, they knew the answer was […]
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