Crisis, Inequity, and Legacy

Abstract This volume brings to the fore the richly nuanced insights that narrative inquiry can produce for understanding COVID-19. It examines how COVID narratives function as models of sense-making and how they connect public and private life. It also explores the ways in which pandemic narratives are being used to create the shared collective memory and cultural legacy of the pandemic, a key insight for future pandemics. The volume expands the critical frameworks through which emerging COVID narratives—experiential, literary, scientific and hybrids of these—can be known, examined, and understood. Through its contributions from scholars working in Africa, Asia, Oceania, North America, and Europe the collection furthers dialogue on the pandemic across geographical, cultural, and social diversity. It considers how COVID-19 intersects with privilege and inequity in diverse social circumstances. The breadth of analysis offered has been carefully assembled to problematise alternative perspectives on the pandemic that reduce it to a global monolith or unhelpful North–South comparisons. This volume shows how the COVID-19 crisis was framed around dominant narratives of fear, sacrifice, war, and dissent. These framings of the public life of the pandemic have erased other ways of knowing and acting derived from the humanities and social sciences, including those that can shed light on lived experience, cultural memory, suffering, inequity, and ethics. This collection uses narrative to shed light on these alternative forms of evidence and of knowing, creating a critical reflective platform for building a shared cultural legacy of the pandemic and more equitable post–COVID-19 futures