Symposium Themes
We invite postgraduate scholars, researchers, academics, and policymakers to join us and offer a critical space for discussion to decipher the impact of the pandemic on critical areas of social life in South Africa and how the pandemic has affected conducting research.
Through the presentation of short papers, we want to engage in critical discussion to develop ideas that will build knowledge in health sociology and the social sciences and shape a future agenda to look at the impact of the pandemic and its aftermath in South Africa the region and beyond.
The symposium will host discussions on the following themes:
- Coping with the uncertainties of life during the Covid-19 pandemic; collective forms of organisation and livelihoods
- Government responses to the pandemic and its impact on vulnerable communities through the various levels of lockdown
- Socio-cultural expression and rituals in the everyday and mundane, the sacred and transcendent
- Illness experiences, subjectivities, and living with the chronicity of long Covid
- Healthcare workers and healthcare institutions, insiders, responding to the pandemic
- Researching social life amidst a pandemic: shortfalls and new possibilities of knowing
A panel discussion will open the symposium’s events on Monday 4th April:
Panel title: What have we learnt from Covid-19 Responses: A Perspective from the Global South
Speakers:
- Dr Gonzalo Basile, Director of the International Health Programme FLACSO- Dominican Republic, and Regional Coordinator International Health- CLACSO.
- Professor Laurel Baldwin-Ragavan (Family Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand)
- Peter van Heusden (South African National Bioinformatics Institute, University of the Western Cape)