COVID-19 and Beyond, Culturally Speaking

September 7, 2020

HKAH Fellows John Erni and Mette Hjort cordially invite Academy members to join them in an online global conversation on the importance of humanities research in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

COVID-19 and Beyond, Culturally Speaking is designed to foster a series of conversations that will both clarify the challenges and begin to articulate solutions.

 
 

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About the conference:

As of 25 August, 2020, almost 24,000,000 people have contracted the dreaded life-threatening COVID-19. Over 800,000 lives have been lost to the virus and we all know that this figure will keep on climbing in the foreseeable future. It is tempting to believe that the public health crisis has a simple cause—a new coronavirus—and a clearly defined solution, namely vaccines and prophylactic and therapeutic treatments. Yet, it is crucial to understand that the cluster of crises—economic, educational, generational, and social, among others—that are now regularly traced to COVID-19, are in fact in large measure the result of culture. For the cultural dimensions of COVID-19 to become apparent, we only need to consider the entrenched positions in the global debate about the value of mandating generalized mask wearing in a given population. In Asia, generally speaking, masks were adopted swiftly whereas citizens in the West were deeply resistant to the practice, citing medical but also cultural reasons for refusing it.

The premise of the international symposium is that the cultural dimensions of COVID-19 deserve the most assiduous attention. For if the crises of COVID-19 have as much to do with culture as they do with the workings of a new predatory virus, then the solutions must be sought not only in the sphere of epidemiological research, but also in the domain of culture.

The symposium is organized by the Hong Kong Baptist University, a liberal arts university in Asia. As its name suggests, HKBU is located in Hong Kong, a city that has largely managed to control the public health crisis. One of the densest cities on earth, Hong Kong’s border with China was never fully closed, nor was a fully-fledged lockdown ever imposed. And yet the number of Hong Kong’s COVID-19 deaths remains small. A global city defined by a mix of Western and Asian cultural traditions, Hong Kong offers a compelling space from which to consider—on an international and comparative basis—how culture contributed to the crises of COVID-19 and what role culture must assume as we seek to extract ourselves from the grip of the virus.

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