Goldsmiths Academics on Covid-19

Angela McRobbie wrote for the Verso Blog on her experience of Covid-19, and paid tribute to the low paid workers who are at the forefront of efforts to tackle the pandemic:

‘The only reason I’m writing this is to re-iterate how, as a society, we now have to swivel 360 degrees to properly value those dedicated workers whose compassion has humbled me in ways I can hardly convey.’

Yasmin Gunaratnam wrote a series of pieces for The Independent. Discover Society and The Guardian on approaches to mourning and palliative care in the face of Covid-19, and how those dying of the virus deserve to do so in diginity:

‘Over the past couple of weeks, medical and palliative care professionals have been urging us to talk more about end-of-life planning, rightly anticipating that covid-19 dying will be unlike anything we have experienced before…. Britain is constructing an industrial machinery of critical care. Yet it is unclear whether we have a parallel infrastructure for palliative care.’ The Independent 

Will Davies wrote for the London Review of Books, The Guardian, the PERC blog and Discover Society on what the world may look like on the other side of the crisis:

‘The term “crisis” derives from the Greek “krisis”, meaning decision or judgment. From this, we also get terms such as critic (someone who judges) and critical condition (a medical state that could go either way). A crisis can conclude well or badly, but the point is that its outcome is fundamentally uncertain. To experience a crisis is to inhabit a world that is temporarily up for grabs… Rather than view this as a crisis of capitalism, it might better be understood as the sort of world-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings.’ The Guardian

Josh Cohen wrote for The Guardian on how covid-19 has exposed the reality of a world without work:

‘With the lockdown, it seems we've lost the routines that give substance to our lives. Need this mean losing ourselves? I'd like to believe that this period could help us discover new creative resources within ourselves…’

Erica Wagner interviewed Grayson Perry for The New Statesman where they discussed the position of the arts in this current moment:

‘“I think one of the interesting things about this whole situation is that it will make people think about the big questions. What is important? What, really, do they need? What, really, do they want to do? Life isn’t a rehearsal, and I think we will all have a kind of existential moment. I think that is good.”’