Category: Social scientists’ views on Covid-19

A few weeks ago, during the Southern African Cities Studies Conference 2020, a panel organised by Alexandra Halligey (South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Witwatersrand) and Kristen Kornienko (Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the...

Encounters with Covid Exploring the theme of the pandemic through a series of podcasts and platforming experts’ and social scientists’ insights on the economic impact of Covid-19 in South Africa, this miniseries of 3 episodes is a collaborative project between Wits University Southern Center for Inequalities Studies (SCIS) and Rethinking...

African views on Covid-19. Call for papers (Deadline: July 20, 2020)  African Views on Covid-19 is a title of a project book that aims to document the ways Africans have faced, or are still facing, the current health crisis, from the perspective of humanities and social sciences. This collective, multidisciplinary, bilingual...

A number of pandemics and epidemics have afflicted the African continent for centuries. Health historians have researched these issues belonging to the field of social and economic history. We have selected two papers focusing on the history of the plague in West Africa from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century...

Africa, a relatively unscathed continent? While it is of course too early to celebrate victory, several researchers see signs of hope in the relatively low progression of the coronavirus on the African continent and, for those most affected such as South Africa, in the capacity to manage the health crisis...

Lockdown and food insecurity in South Africa This article by Jane Battersby highlights a crucial issue in times of lockdown: food supply. While the government has put in place relief measures to secure access to food for the most deprived (e. g. food distributions), the lockdown regulations have of course...

Poverty and pandemic in South Africa Economists have begun to evaluate the economic consequences of Covid-19 already present in South Africa, and to analyse those that will be most likely in the near future. Although it is still early, in the midst of the crisis, to assess how the situation...

We would like to draw your attention to this site, which brings together a wide range of helpful ressources, articles, and forums on Covid-19 in Africa: University World News An interesting contribution on the role of social sciences in solving the crisis can be found here.

How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic is the title of a recent book dedicated to the role played by social scientists in the fight against the last great epidemic in Africa.  Leslie Bank, a professor of social anthropology at Walter Sisulu University (Mthatha, South Africa), supports the idea that...

Since the beginning of the epidemic, implementing lockdown and ‘social distancing’ seems to be a real challenge in the economic and social context of South African townships. The outright imitation of measures taken elsewhere (China, Korea, European countries…) raises insoluble problems in the country’s poorest neighbourhoods. Godfrey Maringira pleads for...