2020 Keywords Symposium

Abstract

2020 (Introduction) Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto 125 Abolish Marisol LeBrón 128 Asynchronous Monica L. Miller 134 COVID Silver Linings Ann Cvetkovich 139 Essential Worker Julie Livingston 144 Food-in-Place (Shelter-in-Place) Psyche Williams-Forson 148 Mask Ruha Benjamin 151 Mutual Aid Christina Hanhardt 152 PPE Harris Solomon, Neelima Navuluri, Charles W. Hargett, Peter S. Kussin 158 Risk Factor Noémi Tousignant 163 Social Distancing Joshua Chambers-Letson 169 Stay at Home Tiana Reid 175 Supply Chain Management Miriam Posner 178 Synchronous Racquel Gates 181 Wave/Forest Fire Sari Altschuler 187 Zoom Gayle Wald 192 Zoonosis (Virus) Banu Subramaniam 196 2020 Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto Academic projects are often born from desire. Essential workers—disproportionately Black and Brown—were ordered to continue working, while others began "panic baking" and "panic shopping" (the disappearance of flour, yeast, and toilet paper from grocery stores marked the first quarter of the year).1 While some buried their dead in anguish and isolation,2 others purchased real estate, thanks to record-low interest rates and new demands for more space as houses were transformed into offices and schools.3 In some ways, this is a quintessentially American story—the variety of ways that crisis is experienced and inhabited, with the starkest and most deathly outcomes reserved for those most precarious as the capitalist machine keeps rolling along. Bleeding into 2021, crisis and critique have merged into a lexicon that is repeated, rehearsed, rehashed, remade.5 These terms have become part of a collective vocabulary, a shared index for describing the relentless conditions of the present, even as that present is experienced and endured differently. Media has obsessively reported that this is a crisis that mostly women are bearing, but universities have done far too little to recognize these facts on the ground for caretakers, including the return to in-campus teaching when vaccines are not available for children under twelve.6 We name this as two senior scholars, keenly aware of how "home-schooling" disproportionately affects junior women scholars and primary caretaker colleagues navigating the dual demands of tenure and caregiving. [...]the same is true of race, as institutions have begun diversity trainings, hired diversity coordinators, promised diversity cluster hires, and launched university-wide reckonings with race and "DEI."