Introduction - Knowing COVID-19: The pandemic and beyond - Fred Cooper and Des Fitzgerald

1 Pandemic imaginaries of interspecies relatedness: More-than-human microbial methods on the bus - Charlotte Veal, Paul Hurley, Emma Roe and Sandra Wilks
2 Deafblindness, touch and COVID-19 - Azadeh Emadi
3 Testing, testing – what about the instructions? - Sue Walker, Josefina Bravo and Al Edwards
4 Home and neighbourhood: pandemic geographies of dwelling and belonging - Alison Blunt, Kathy Burrell, Georgina Endfield, Miri Lawrence, Eithne Nightingale, Alastair Owens, Jacqueline Waldock and Annabelle Wilkins
5 Crisis and engagement: the emotional toll of museum work during the COVID-19 pandemic - Elizabeth Crooke and David Farrell-Banks
6 Storying older women’s immobilities and gender-based violence in the COVID-19 pandemic - Lesley Murray, Amanda Holt and Jessica Moriarty
7 Empowering obstinate memory – the experiences of Black, Asian and Migrant Nurses before, during and after the pandemic - Anandi Ramamurthy and Ken Fero
8 The shameful dead: vaccine hesitancy, shame and necropolitics during COVID-19 - Fred Cooper, Luna Dolezal and Arthur Rose
Index

This book explores how COVID-19 moved from being a mysterious and frightening novel infectious disease to something subject to an enormous amount of knowledge production. This volume focuses specifically on the role of humanities research within this vast epistemological engine. Across eight empirical chapters, Knowing COVID-19 traces the role of researchers in the humanities as they brought their expertise to bear on vital unknown questions in and around the pandemic. These included: how to make at-home diagnostic tests understandable; how to communicate the risks of public transport without stigmatising the people who use that transport; what problems a suddenly touch-free world would create for deafblind people; what forms of racism and racialised experience were likely to be worsened by the pandemic; and how workers in places like museums would deal with sudden closures and furlough schemes.

The volume shows how humanities research does not simply comprise a set of tools for interpretation and meaning, to be applied when a crisis has safely passed; rather, it shows how collaborative, experimental, and risky humanities research has been vital to actually resolving – and living through – the COVID-19 crisis.