Kirsten Ostherr and the Medical Futures Lab are conducting a survey to identify humanities-based (and humanities-inspired) responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, so that they may document and help others build upon these creative efforts. Ostherr and her team are interested in all kinds of pandemic responses that involve some dimension of the humanities, and they are particularly interested in "translational humanities" approaches. This survey seeks to capture those humanities-based interventions in order to disseminate its findings through a public-facing website that will inform scholars, artists, policymakers, government officials, students, educators, health professionals, patients, community-based organizations, technology developers, and others who are engaged in helping individuals and communities survive and thrive during the pandemic. The Medical Futures Lab is building this project website as a translational humanities resource that can help us balance out our technological and biomedical responses to the pandemic.
Recently, Ostherr has discussed the role of the humanities in the context of Covid in an applied sense for the podcast Infectious Historians (see left column).
The goal of this project is to bring humanities research methods and insights to a broader public that would benefit from access to these approaches during the time of pandemic crisis. We seek to identify projects that translate humanities for public engagement and support - to improve human lives - and therefore, we see the project as translational.
Explore the Humanities pathways that led to this project
Houston, Texas, USA