COVID-19 Roundtable

Abstract

The past year was an unprecedentedly challenging period to humanity. The very concept of a pandemic indicates a profound impact across different regions and societal strata, rendering the idea of unscathed human lives almost unimaginable. Still, this image of COVID-19 as a global threat menacing us all must not be allowed to efface the specificity of individual or communal struggles. This caveat is particularly relevant in the context of gender and diversity studies – the pertinence of which has been underscored countlessly over the past months, especially in policy recommendations to the COVID-19 pandemic. From the disproportionately severe measures aggravating isolation and destitution among the elderly to the coalescence of sanitary regulations and the BLM protests or the fire in the Moria refugee camp and the resulting urgency to address the wellbeing of displaced people: issues that relate intimately to notions of marginalization continually surface adjacent to the health crisis proper. Whether explicitly or implicitly, these circumstances call for gender and diversity scholars to commit their expertise to the benefit of those inordinately affected by COVID-19 and the array of responses it has evoked worldwide. At the same time, the conditions affecting these groups and individuals also affect research activities and advocacy work on gender and diversity, inhibiting the active commitment and scholarly involvement the situation demands. In this Spring 2021 General Issue, the Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies (DiGeSt) sought to explore the paradoxes, contradictions and tensions scholars in our field have faced and continue to face during the current COVID-19 crisis. Transcending a formally academic register, the roundtable includes personal, situated accounts that engage tensions between the pandemic and scholarly work in diversity and gender studies.