Pandemic pasts, pandemic futures

The postponed conference “Pandemic pasts, pandemic futures. Sources, histories, imaginations” has been finally scheduled for 5-7 May 2022, to be held – as originally planned – in the premises of the old lazaretto of Mahon, Balearic Islands, Spain.

The COVID-19 pandemic has definitively shaken the late 20th-century belief in the end of infectious disease outbreaks in Western societies. The result is a feeling of reluctant reconnection with the past, when recurrent waves of plague, cholera, yellow fever, or influenza wreaked havoc upon large sections of the world population. Pandemics lie ahead again, imminent or in a more distant future, and collective fear, mistrust and disorientation are likely to arise from time to time, as they did in previous centuries. Another general conviction is that COVID-19 will trigger – or accelerate – disruptions in politics, economy, society and culture. Parallels with the instability of the interwar period have already been suggested. The 11th European Spring School “Pandemic pasts, pandemic futures. Sources, histories, imaginations” intends to live up to the intellectual and social challenges brought about by the current pandemic. It will explore a trans-disciplinary idea: when a crisis storms the present, the search for solutions obliges to revisit the past and to re-imagine the future. Taking pandemics as events whose medical and sanitary traits are matched (or even exceeded) by their social, economic, cultural and political dimensions, the School will examine how devastating waves of disease end up bringing new configurations of collective life. A multidisciplinary approach will combine historical, anthropological, and artistic perspectives.

Because the conference was postponed from its original dates in November of 2021, a second and final call for papers is launched.
Deadline CfP: November 15, 2021.
All information is found here.