Teaching a pandemic in real time
Diana Dayoub (left), a senior in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, takes "walking office hours" with Anu Ramaswami, the Sanjay Swani '87 Professor of India Studies, and professor of civil and environmental engineering, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. Dayoub is enrolled in Ramaswami's class this on semester on engineering cities post-COVID-19.
Current events often find their way into academic studies, but rarely with such urgency and immediacy as with COVID-19.
The pandemic has impacted Princeton University students and faculty both personally and academically, as they have adapted to distance and hybrid learning. At the same time, the broad impact of the coronavirus pandemic on society has opened new lines of inquiry in every field of study.
This semester more than a dozen Princeton courses focus on the effects or implications of COVID-19. Five Princeton professors shared how they are teaching about the pandemic — and its long-term scholarly implications — as they live through this extraordinary time in history.
Theater and the Plague
Michael Cadden, senior lecturer in theater, Lewis Center for the Arts
Is this a new course or an existing course?
This is a new course. Since our brains are already spending so much time obsessing about illness, I thought I might offer students a way to channel their anxiety — to say nothing of my own — while getting course credit.
How are you incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic into your curriculum this semester?
We started with some all-too-topical essays about how writers represent illness in general and “plagues” in particular. My students were struck by Susan Sontag’s idea that “Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.” We were all feeling pretty “washed out” by “significance” after nearly a year of COVID-time! As we learn more about the disease and devise effective treatments, we may find that, like many diseases before it, it becomes less “awash in significance.” So the literature of the past illuminates a largely hopeful trajectory, despite the large body count.
What are the advantages and/or the challenges of teaching a subject that is unfolding in real time?
“Real time” always has lots of “real s--t” on offer about any important subject, including this one. For example, there’s a pandemic meme that suggests Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during a plague outbreak, when the theaters were closed. Maybe. But, as Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith notes, he was lucky he had a wife taking care of the kids back home in Stratford — the ones still alive, that is. His son Hamnet died of the plague in 1596. (Everyone should read Maggie O’Farrell’s excellent novel “Hamnet,” published last year, which resonates with our own experience of how a pandemic reshapes our sense of what “unfolding in real time” might mean.) Shakespeare also had rich friends with country estates to escape to and tours of the provinces to profit from when London got to be too much. And he didn’t have to Zoom all day. So please, spare me the example of Shakespeare! Teaching is difficult enough at the moment, learning even more so. My students demonstrate their everyday heroism by showing up for class with the reading done and the assignments completed. They dive into the material with enthusiastic interest and intelligence. Whenever they use the words “I’m sorry” or “I apologize,” I remind them that those words are banned for the duration!
Theater and the Plague
"The plays we’re reading and, when possible, watching online never fail to provoke discussion that ties the past to the present."
Michael Cadden, senior lecturer in theater, Lewis Center for the Arts
What resources have been especially useful to you or key to your teaching?
The plays we’re reading and, when possible, watching online never fail to provoke discussion that ties the past to the present: Sophocles’ “Oedipus the King” (leadership and an infected “body politic”), Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”(the dual plagues of civil strife and romantic love, as well as a health crisis that screws up mail delivery), Ben Jonson’s “The Alchemist” (the plague as economic disaster and opportunity — if you’re a billionaire, you’re worth 40% more this March than last). We also look at some non-theatrical texts more inclined to get down and dirty, like Thomas Dekker’s “The Wonderfulle Yeare 1603,” and Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which read like uncensored versions of the nightly news. After some classics of “plague literature,” we’ll pause to consider Camus’ novel “The Plague,” surely the most-read book of 2020, before moving on to AIDS drama. I’m a gay man of a certain age. When my doctor first told me that, from a COVID-19 point of view, I was to think of myself as an “elderly” man “with underlying conditions,” I protested that this was the second time in my life I felt demographically targeted by a disease.
How are students reacting to the material? How is it reflecting their lived experiences?
Most of my students are pursuing the certificate in Global Health and Health Policy, so they come with a different kind of investment in the material than the literature majors and theater certificate folks. The course may offer them a new way to think about issues they’ve already considered from more STEM-based perspectives. One of the few upsides of Zoom is that you can sometimes see the lightbulb above someone’s head go on! Sometimes they share, sometimes they don’t. At the end of the course, we’ll be looking at some plays that have emerged from our own pandemic which see it as a health crisis and/or a symptom of our national and global failings. As we will have done throughout the course, we’ll be looking for work that makes the unthinkable suffering and loss we’ve experienced over the last year truly “thinkable.” Suffering and death are, of course, golden opportunities for both theater and science, though the theater is more aware of the entertainment value of human beings at their worst moments. We, the audience, get out alive, as do the actors; we celebrate that fact with the curtain call. Survivor guilt is real, to be sure, but so is survivor glee!
Freshman Seminar: Fighting for Health
Leslie Gerwin, associate director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; lecturer in American studies
Is this a new course or an existing course?
When the pandemic unfolded at the beginning of the spring 2020 semester, I was teaching a new course in public health. Pandemic issues were on the syllabus for weeks six to eight, but they moved up to week two and beyond. In short order, students were finding that almost every class in every discipline was becoming “all COVID all the time.” Given that their lives were dominated by the unfolding developments and the uncertainty associated with their future, academic saturation was problematic for many. I changed the syllabus to accommodate the Zoom format, but in many classes allowed COVID to be an influence and echo rather than the dominant discussion. I developed the freshman seminar for this spring semester in part to allow students to process their experience with COVID and to translate the lessons their experience is offering, as well as those offered by the study of other health challenges, into actions that improve people’s lives.
How are you incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic into your curriculum this semester?
Given the interest of those choosing the seminar in activism and public service, it is easier to engage them in examining the intersection between the scholarly and scientific literature and what is happening in real time. The concepts of systemic racism, social determinants of health, the tension between government mandates and individual autonomy are not merely academic inquiries. As the seminar explores the efforts to fight the health risks associated with major challenges, I expect that students will hear echoes and see parallels in their COVID experience. I expect they will bring new insights to the discussions examining AIDS, tobacco, environmental justice and opioids among other topics.
What are the advantages and/or the challenges of teaching a subject that is unfolding in real time?
The virtual learning necessitated by the pandemic demands a lot of work from the instructor of a three-hour seminar, plus lots of office hours. Yet there is always more to talk about than time to talk. Few ever appear bored. One pandemic effect is that I have also Zoomed with many students from previous years’ public health seminars (an upper division listing from which the freshman seminar was adapted), most of whom graduated, but want to talk about how they are experiencing what we explored in class.
The pandemic has transformed everyone’s life and expectations. It has provided valuable lessons, learned both in courses and in lived experience. That said, there are no real advantages associated with a contagion that has killed millions of people worldwide.
Freshman Seminar: Fighting for Health
"The pandemic has transformed public health from a shadow subject and loosely understood professional field to a front line discipline, both academically and professionally."
Leslie Gerwin, associate director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, lecturer in American studies
How does the COVID-19 pandemic speak to larger issues in your field?
The “irony” associated with my teaching over the past 20 years (at Princeton and elsewhere) is that I taught courses in public health, a discipline that students usually initially confused with health care. By contrast, public health focuses on the government’s responsibility for protecting the population’s collective health. The legitimacy of government interventions that order individuals to sacrifice for the common good originates in the necessity for having an authority that can respond to dangers such as contagious disease. My own scholarship during the past decade has focused on issues associated with, what many believed was the remote possibility of, an existential pandemic.
How are students reacting to the material? How is it reflecting their lived experiences?
The pandemic has transformed public health from a shadow subject and loosely understood professional field to a front line discipline, both academically and professionally. Students exposed to the discipline recognize that public health offers many avenues to those seeking ways they may become change agents and engage in efforts to improve the world. As a teacher, those discussions with students are very satisfying.
Performance in Extraordinary Times
Judith Hamera, professor of dance, Lewis Center for the Arts and American studies
Is this a new course or an existing course?
This is a new course, developed with the support of the 250th Fund Summer 2020 cycle and first offered in fall 2020.
How are you incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic into your curriculum this semester?
The conjuncture of the COVID-19 pandemic and anti-racist imperatives raised by Black Lives Matter, and their impact on the U.S. performing arts, are the subject of the course. It asks students to investigate and document the ways this conjuncture is affecting student performing arts groups on campus, with the option of conducting an oral history interview for inclusion in Princeton’s archives of student life.
What are the advantages and/or the challenges of teaching a subject that is unfolding in real time?
The urgency and significance of the subject matter has resulted in considerable student investment; they are very serious about this work because, in all cases, it deals with organizations they deeply care about. They are living the challenges they are researching. The challenge is that the professional dance and theater worlds have generated such robust responses that it can be difficult to manage all of the material coming in without overwhelming the students.
Performance in Extraordinary Times
"The urgency and significance of the subject matter has resulted in considerable student investment; they are very serious about this work because, in all cases, it deals with organizations they deeply care about."
Judith Hamera, professor of dance, Lewis Center for the Arts and American studies
What resources have been especially useful to you or key to your teaching?
The professional dance and theater worlds have mobilized to address this extraordinary moment in collaborative documents like “Creating New Futures, Phase One,” and sets of demands and accountability initiatives like “We See You, White American Theater,” to name only two examples. These materials serve as valuable course texts: enabling students to set the work on-campus student organizations are doing into larger contexts. Jessica Bailey, arts program coordinator in the Office of the Dean for Undergraduate Students, has been an invaluable collaborator, as has Valencia Johnson, project archivist for student life. Indeed Valencia’s COVID-19 and Me Oral History Project was an inspiration for this course. In addition, we have benefited from Zoom visits by guests: artists, arts administrators and educators across the U.S. who are actively involved in addressing COVID exigencies and anti-racist imperatives, including Ogemdi Ude, Class of 2016.
How does the COVID-19 pandemic speak to larger issues in your field?
The performing arts sector has been devasted due to COVID-19 closures. Contracts have been canceled, often without any compensation. Studio facilities are no longer accessible, meaning that dancers are training without access to barres and dance floors. Ensemble work is only now resuming, though not uniformly. It is difficult to overstate how dramatically and thoroughly the pandemic has impacted the performing arts on campus and off. Many small organizations are facing overwhelming financial and facilities challenges and may never reopen.
How are students reacting to the material? How is it reflecting their lived experiences?
Students in the course are members of performing arts organizations on campus, as well as taking courses and doing thesis work in the arts. This course directly addresses their lived experiences as artists in a time of profound challenge. They are embracing the course materials with rigor and thoughtfulness: questioning guests to gather best practices, probing points where logistical adjustments meet anti-racist commitments and safety, and reflecting on existential questions about what it means to be an artist now.
From the Apocalypse to the ‘New Normal’ (and back)
Natalia Castro Picón, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese
Is this a new course or an existing course?
It is new, but a certain theoretical basis, and some case studies are taken from previous research on apocalyptic representations of the 2008 economic crisis in Spain. Last semester I presented a course on this same subject, which included a thematic block on the pandemic (using materials from an exploratory and very initiatory archive). But finally, I could not teach it due to issues precisely related to the pandemic.
How are you incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic into your curriculum this semester?
In the course, we are analyzing the pandemic as a certain temporality of crisis and, in particular, exploring the cultural paradigm — or, rather, the battle between different cultural projects — that emerges from it. To do so, we start from the apocalyptic imaginaries that typically emerge in crisis contexts and that circulated widely among the mass and social media at the beginning of the pandemic. But we also take the concept of “new normal” as a virtual point of arrival, as a collective projection of the aftermath of the crisis. The apocalyptic imagination works precisely in this way: From every apocalypse, a new world emerges, and here we ask ourselves what the one that is already taking shape from today's imagination consists of, and by means of what cultural, political and social mechanisms it does so.
What are the advantages and/or the challenges of teaching a subject that is unfolding in real time?
I suppose, in our case, the main advantage is that this perspective allows us to increase awareness of how narratives about the present and projections into the future are being constructed. Paying attention to the discourses as they emerge allows us to observe more easily the mechanisms that shape those representations, as well as their reception. This perspective "from inside" also allows us to appreciate the breadth of a constellation of images and discourses that is complex and multiple. In this way, we can witness the struggle between the many ways of interpreting our present. In the future, some of these representations may be diluted, lose strength or disappear. In the present, on the other hand, we can witness this cultural contest in all its variables.
From the Apocalypse to the ‘New Normal’ (and back)
"The apocalyptic imagination works precisely in this way: From every apocalypse, a new world emerges."
Natalia Castro Picón, assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese
What resources have been especially useful to you or key to your teaching?
Given our subject of study, the most useful and interesting resource has been the massive phenomenon of cultural production “from below” circulated through the Internet. The thousands of people (common people and creators of greater or lesser experience or prestige) that, intending to break the communicational barrier opened by social distance or to go through the emotional storm, have shared their experience using creative languages of all kinds (literature, orality, image, cooking, etc.) This event has updated the idea of culture as a common place, rather than as a market, and as something essential in everyday life. Thanks to these materials, students can have a clearer glance at the depth of the phenomenon we are analyzing.
How does the COVID-19 pandemic speak to larger issues in your field?
When all this began, I had been studying the economic crisis and its representation based on apocalyptic imaginaries for a while. Other colleagues were also analyzing this phenomenon in Spain and elsewhere, so there was already an open conversation about it. This event has necessarily been incorporated into the debate and transformed it. The pandemic has forced us to review our premises and to look closely at the present regarding the immediate past because, like any great event, it projects its effects in all directions.
How are students reacting to the material? How is it reflecting their lived experiences?
When I asked the students why they decided to enroll in the course, several of them answered me that they did it to have some time to reflect, assimilate, and try to understand what they had experienced — not only on an intellectual level but also on an emotional one. This motivation has been developing during these weeks. I believe that in a more or less conscious way, we have proposed to use the course to, among all of us, give a new language to this experience that, because of its exceptionality (for being so unusual and so traumatic), seemed to have rendered the pre-existing codes of meaning useless. This is precisely what Ernesto De Martino, one of our sources, considers a “cultural apocalypse.” And this anthropologist explains that in order to make these crises “culturally productive” we need, precisely, to rebuild intersubjective links through the collective production of new common languages. It seems to me that in my course all the students have embraced that ambition.
However, this cannot result in a monologic account of the event. And, to avoid that, the plurality of voices, experiences and perspectives that the students bring to the conversation is tremendously helpful. We don’t talk only about the materials from the materials themselves, or through the secondary reads, but we constantly intersect them with personal and shared experiences. Some of their experiences are as astonishing as overwhelming (one student worked in ambulances during the entire health emergency); others allow us to see very interesting cultural contrasts in terms of crisis management (there are students from Korea, Spain and the United States); there is also a diversity of opinions on the topics of discussion, because everyone has been able to experience it from different cultural backgrounds and vital and material conditions. All this makes the language we build together vibrant, diverse and dynamic.
Special topics in Sustainable, Resilient Cities and Infrastructure Systems: Engineering the Post-COVID City
Anu Ramaswami, the Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies; professor of civil and environmental engineering, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; director, Chadha Center for Global India
Is this a new course or an existing course?
It is a new course, created to think about redesigning infrastructure and food provisioning systems post-COVID. It looks at learning from the current pandemic to build better cities of the future.
How are you incorporating the COVID-19 pandemic into your curriculum this semester?
The class is organized around a framework to build back better, so how we learn from COVID to build back cities that are more pandemic-resilient, as well as sustainable and equitable. We integrate some of the new learnings about how we can better detect pandemics and prepare for them, how we operate cities more equitably when we have threats, and also when there are compounded threats, like when we had wildfires while the pandemic was raging or when food stores were closed during the George Floyd protests. And then looking long-term, how we can address some of the basic issues that came up, such as providing food when there’s strict quarantine, or how public transit was reduced in operations, but the essential workers still had to go to work.
What are the advantages and/or the challenges of teaching a subject that is unfolding in real time?
The advantage is it is a creative and open topic. We are looking at insights from this pandemic, but also looking to the future. Since we are not modeling the pandemic per se, we are not much hampered by the real time changes with vaccines, etc. The students have come up with interesting projects. One student is focusing on the food system, both from the production side — how quickly it rebounded — and the supply side, how we can understand food insecurity better. Another student is focusing on how islands coped with COVID, because they were already remote. Hawaii, for instance, had much stricter testing processes because they knew they were very vulnerable. So how did they manage resources, how did they manage tracking, tracing and the flow of people? The third student is taking on transportation, what kind of transportation systems we might have in the future. For example, Paris has shown that micromobility has improved substantially with people using scooters. You can meet outside, and each scooter is only for a single person, so you can wipe down the scooter and you’re good to go. It’s interesting that micromobility options are now available alongside Uber and Lyft and public transport. All of this is near transit stops. Many cities also did traffic calming. They allowed restaurants to open seating areas in road space. How much of that will that continue? How much will that encourage more walking? These are wonderful, open questions.
Anu Ramaswami
Special topics in Sustainable, Resilient Cities and Infrastructure Systems: Engineering the Post-COVID City
"The class is organized around a framework to build back better, so how would we learn from COVID to build back cities that are more pandemic-resilient, as well as sustainable and equitable."
Anu Ramaswami, the Sanjay Swani ’87 Professor of India Studies; professor of civil and environmental engineering, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies; and the High Meadows Environmental Institute; director, Chadha Center for Global India
What resources have been especially useful to you or key to your teaching?
I have invited different guest lecturers for the second half of the class, so we have one focusing on islands and island responses to both COVID and general sustainability challenges. We will have one guest lecture focused on food, where I will invite city managers from Delhi and Minneapolis because they faced some of the most difficult food insecurity challenges for different reasons. For transportation, there’s a group looking at mobility maps to help scientists understand how people move between counties. So hopefully we will be able to invite the company that developed the mobility maps and the city using those maps to better design transportation.
How does the COVID-19 pandemic speak to larger issues in your field?
The topics I work on are resilience, social equity and health, alongside environmental sustainability. Most of the global burden of disease arises from noncommunicable diseases caused by air pollution, poor diet and sedentary lifestyles. I think COVID is shining light on how communicable diseases intersect with all co-morbidities, which are associated with noncommunicable diseases. If you look globally in many countries, those other things are still the biggest killers. Air pollution is by far the biggest killer in India, even now. We have done well as a society in eradicating so many communicable diseases. So it brings back the question, how do we combine a focus on viral diseases with this background high level of risk from noncommunicable diseases, which are shaped by the built environment? Air pollution, walkability and food — those three things come up over and over again. We always knew we had both communicable and noncommunicable diseases, but now we’re forced to look at them together in a sharper way.
In terms of equity, we have known society is unequal, but the pandemic has more sharply exposed how when we have hazards, our response to them is highly inequitable both by income and race. We will explore data sets that look at inequality by race and income. George Floyd’s death catalyzed greater awareness of this in the midst of this pandemic which made the issue even more front and center. Scholars had known structural racism plays out spatially in cities. We are now able to see many more disparities across every aspect of life: water, housing, pollution, health, access to vaccines. So getting a handle on how to tackle this is important.
We have always talked about resilience in the context of environmental hazards, like storms and extreme heat, but we haven’t had an event of this duration in recent decades. The Great Recession in 2008 affected multiple sectors, but it didn’t shut down numerous activities for an extended period. For instance, the downturn affected the economy, but it didn’t affect food or water supplies. It didn’t affect transportation. We always knew about resilience, but the pandemic has changed its scope. Numerous severe storm events cause disruption, but they are of shorter duration, such as the Texas ice storm. Here you have a pandemic that is fairly intense and hasn’t let up for several months. When we think of resilience, this is a new type of threat.
How are students reacting to the material? How is it reflecting their lived experiences?
The concepts of wellbeing, when we talk about mental wellbeing and people’s ability to cope, are obviously resonating. The students are all from different disciplines, so that has been interesting: how we think of change, how we think of projects, how we think of science. One student is an engineer, one is a sociologist, the third is in economics and the School of Public and International Affairs. The postdocs, one is a geographer and one is a planner. You have five different disciplines right there. It took us two or three weeks to come to the same place, what have you learned about your own discipline and what you are learning about other disciplines. We’ve had very interesting, very insightful conversations.
