COVID-19 has swept across the world with devastating speed, scale, and severity. This degree of spread and impact have brought huge changes and significant challenges for economies, civil society organisations, and everyday citizens. The uneven politics and policies of national and international responses are already revealing crucial questions that the social sciences and humanities are well-placed to answer. Overcoming the present crisis and beginning to move towards a post-coronavirus future will require the kind of careful and authoritative analysis for which LSE is renowned.
What we are doing
This COVID-19 portal brings together and builds upon the many different strands of COVID-related research and analysis that are being carried out by our researchers and associated faculty at LSE.
First, a growing series of blog posts on the pandemic draws on the knowledge and expertise of researchers at LSE and colleagues at other institutions, with many articles also available in Portuguese and Spanish.
To date, our blogs have examined the impact of the pandemic in terms of economic development, supply chains, human rights and rule of law, urban inequalities, the role of community health workers, medical internationalism, and the livelihoods of vulnerable groups.
We have also started a video series that draws on research conducted at the School to provide insights into COVID-19 and its effects. The initial presentations tackle urban inequalities, gender dimensions of the pandemic, drug patent regulations, and human security.
We have also highlighted related research projects at the Centre which can help us to understand how the pandemic will unfold in the region and how public policy might best respond to that challenge.
What comes next?
Our understanding of the pandemic and its consequences must be framed by research. We need to dig deeper into how measures designed to deal with the pandemic are currently percolating into peoples’ everyday lives, as well as how government policies, economic activity, and cultural and social practices will be shaped by the pandemic in future.
Over the coming months, we will publish a series of policy briefs that analyse how countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have responded to the pandemic. Authored by faculty members, researchers, and doctoral students at the LSE, we also aim to make these briefs available in Spanish and Portuguese so as to bring their insights to as large an audience as possible within the region itself.
Our policy briefs will explore and analyse the what, how, and why of the region's more successful approaches, with the ultimate goal of helping to guide research towards those areas that will best enable us to prepare for a (post-) pandemic future.
Professor Gareth A. Jones
Director, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre
Banner image: Joshua E. Cogan/PAHO, CC BY-NC 2.0