The New School’s India China Institute and International Affairs Programs Host Discourses on Global Pandemics
Beginning with the premise that a global contagion demands global perspectives, The New School’s India China Institute and the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs have launched a new blog series: “Pandemic Discourses.” The new global dialogue series examines the historical, social, and political dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The inaugural issue, launched on May 21, 2020, includes a contribution by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former President of Brazil, and Celso Amorim, the former Minister of External Relations of Brazil, called “The Pandemic and the Challenges of the Multipolar Order: A View from the South.” The issue also features contributions by scholars Carlos Lopes of the University of Cape Town and Biao Xiang of the University of Oxford. The series is co-edited by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, professor of international affairs and director of the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs; Manjari Mahajan, associate professor of international affairs and Starr Professor and co-director of the India China Institute; and Mark Frazier, professor of politics at The New School for Social Research and Starr Professor and co-director of the India China Institute.
According to co-editors Fukuda-Parr, Mahajan, and Frazier, the articles included in the first issue “epitomize the International Affairs programs’ and the India China Institute’s objectives to publish interdisciplinary views from diverse parts of the world, including the Global South, in debates that have become dominated by European- and United States-centric writing. The series will continue to provide perspectives from different corners of the world, and especially the Global South, bringing to the forefront variable and contested understandings of disease, expertise, and society.”
The Pandemic Discourses blog series complements the International Affairs Programs’ monthly webinar series “Global Pandemics in an Unequal World.” The next webinar in that series, “Global Access to Vaccines: the Politics of Negotiations and the Global South” is scheduled for May 28, 2020 and will feature a discussion on the politics of negotiating the universal vaccine, including panelists Mariangela Simao, Assistant Director General of the World Health Organization on Access to Medicines, Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals, as well as funders of vaccine research, negotiators, and activists.
New entries scheduled in the upcoming days include work from Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs at The New School, Cui Zhiyuan, professor at the School of Public Policy and Management, Tsinghua University in Beijing, Mukta Naik, Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, Anne-Emanuelle Birn, professor of critical development studies and of social and behavioural health sciences at the University of Toronto, and Andrew Lakoff, professor of sociology and communication at USC.