Resources
Below are resources the Center for Critical Thought has put together for these unprecedented times we find ourselves in. These resources provide a theoretical framework in which to view the COVID-19 pandemic, and they have been broken down by overarching subject matter. Hyperlinks have been provided when possible. Please browse this content, and if you have a link that you think we should add, reach out to criticalthought@colorado.edu.
How to Survive a Disaster, On Building a Paradise in Hell: Improvised, Collaborative, Cooperative, Local, By Rebecca Solnit. Literary Hub, November 15, 2016
Mutual aid for the end of the world, By Kelly Rose Pflug-Back, September 5, 2019
The Only Treatment for Coronavirus Is Solidarity, By Jedediah Britton-Purdy, Jacobin Mag, March 3, 2020
Coronavirus and community activism, By Jonathan Neale, Ecologist, March 6, 2020
Covid: The Ethical Disease, By Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Critical Legal Thinking, March 13, 2020
Autonomous Groups Are Mobilizing Mutual Aid Initiatives To Combat The Coronavirus - It’s Going Down, March 14, 2020
Decolonizing Community Care in Response to Covid-19, By Jade Begay, March 13, 2020
After the Quarantine, the Flood, By Natasha Lennard, Commune Magazine, March 14, 2020
Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide. Capitalism in Crisis—Rising Totalitarianism—Strategies of Resistance, March 18, 2020
Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing, March 18, 2020
Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid & How to Organize in the Age of Coronavirus, Democracy Now, March 20, 2020
What libertarians would do in response to coronavirus, The Week, March 13, 2020
What does feminist leadership look like in a pandemic? By Leila Billing, March 21, 2020
Coronavirus and Mutual Aid- Nowadays we are living in a common History. Void Network / Athens, March 29, 2020
The Ecology of Disease, By Jim Robbins, July 14, 2012
Think Exotic Animals Are to Blame for the Coronavirus? Think Again, By Sonia Shah, The Nation, February 18, 2020
Capitalist agriculture and Covid-19: A deadly combination, interview with Rob Wallace, climate & capitalism, March 11, 2020
'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?, By John Vidal, The Guardian, March 18, 2020
How Global Agriculture Grew a Pandemic. The COVID-19 crisis was preventable—if only we’d listened to the epidemiologists sounding the alarm, By Stephanie Bastek, The American Scholar, March 13, 2020
Destruction of habitat and loss of biodiversity are creating the perfect conditions for diseases like COVID-19 to emerge, By John Vidal, March 17, 2020
Neel Ahuja: Bioinsecurities. Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
Covid-19 is nature's wake-up call to complacent civilisation, By George Monbiot. The Guardian, March 25, 2020
Coronavirus: 'Nature is sending us a message’, says UN environment chief. By Damian Carrington. The Guardian, March 25, 2020
Is factory farming to blame for coronavirus?, By Laura Spinney. The Guardian, March 28, 2020
Is This A Dress Rehearsal?, By Bruno Latour, March 26, 2020
Human impact on wildlife to blame for spread of viruses, says study. The Guardian, April 8, 2020
New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates, By Lisa Friedman, New York Times, April 7, 2020
Cradle of the Virus: How Forests are the Source of and Solution to Emergent Pathogens - WWF report.
The Pandemic Is Not a Natural Disaster. The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one, By Kate Brown, The New Yorker, April 13, 2020
Coronavirus: who will be winners and losers in new world order?, By Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 11 Apr 2020
How Pandemics Change History, By Isaac Chotiner, The New Yorker, March 3, 2020
The Distance Between Us: The Implications of Pandemic Influenza in 1918-1919, By Esyllt W. Jones, March 14, 2020
The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff, By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic, March 15, 2020
The Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the World, 2017, By Laura Spinney: Pale Rider
Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, Frank M. Snowden, Yale University Press, 2019
Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600. Course Yale University, Frank Snowden
Why COVID-19 is hitting Black women so hard, By Treva Lindsey
Coronavirus isn’t transphobic. But America’s economic and health systems are, By Katelyn Burns
"Under the Blacklight: The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that COVID Lays Bare" Part I, hosted by Kimberle Crenshaw
"How to Beat Coronavirus Capitalism", With Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, with a musical performance by Lia Rose
Movement Building in the Time of the Coronavirus: A Rising Majority Teach-In, Angela Davis & Naomi Klein with Rising Majority leaders Thenjiwe McHarris (Blackbird), Cindy Wiesner (Grassroots Global Justice), Maurice Mitchell (Working Families Party), and Loan Tran (Southern Vision Alliance)
The Pandemic Imagination, By Siddhartha Deb, The New Republic, March 16, 2020
City of Pain, By Teju Cole, April 2 2020
Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, By Jonathan Lear, 2008
The Difficulty of Reality and a revolt against Mourning, By Jonathan Lear, 2018
The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy, By Cora Diamond, 2003
We Can Waste Another Crisis, or We Can Transform the Economy, By Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Thea Riofrancos. Jacobin, March 14, 2020
Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It, By Naomi Klein, The Intercept, March 16, 2020 (you can find the associated video here)
The Covid-19 crisis is a chance to do capitalism differently, By Mariana Mazzucato, The Guardian, March 18, 2020
Capitalism Has its Limits, By Judith Butler, Verso, 19 March 2020
Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19, By David Harvey, March 19, 2020
Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus, By Yuval Noah Harari, March 20, 2020
The coronavirus crisis shows we need an entirely new economic system, By Paul Mason, New Statesman America, March 18, 2020
Surviving the Virus: An Anarchist Guide, By CrimeithInc, March 18, 2020
A degrowth perspective on the coronavirus crisis, By the degrowth.info Editorial Team, March 19, 2020
Social movements in times of pandemic: another world is needed, By Donatella della Porta, March 23, 2020
What the virus said? "I've come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn't find", By LundiMatin, March 21, 2020
No return to normal: for a post-pandemic liberation, By Max Haiven, March 23, 2020
The Normal Economy Is Never Coming Back. By Adam Tooze, Foreign Policy, April 9, 2020
How coronavirus almost brought down the global financial system. By Adam Tooze, The Guardian, April 14, 2020.
Who Gets Forgotten in a Pandemic. By Mike Davis, The Nation, March 13, 2020
Pandemic Demands and Mutual Aid, By Al Mikey and Julia H, Plan C, March 16, 2020
In Practice, there are Two Pandemics: One for the Well-Off and One for the Poor, By Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes, Global Policies, March 20, 2020
Inequality, anti-Roma racism, and the coronavirus, By Bernard Rorkeburssels, March 19, 2020
In Africa, social distancing is a privilege few can afford, By Karsten Noko, March 22, 2020
Body politics at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, By Gediminas Lesutis, Roar Magazine, April 11, 2020
Snowden Warns Governments Are Using Coronavirus to Build 'the Architecture of Oppression', By Trone Dowd, Vice, Apr 10, 2020
Inside Dominic Cummings’s coronavirus meeting with big tech, By Gian Volpicello, Wire, March 12, 2020
"Slack, Zoom, Google Hangouts: Are Your Remote Work Apps Spying on You?", By Yael Grauer, March 22, 2020
Cities at War… and Its Diverse Manifestations, By Saskia Sassen, newcities.org, March 13, 2020
The Urbanization of COVID-19. Creighton Connolly, By Harris Ali and Roger Keil, Urban Political Podcast, March 14, 2020
Bio-austerity and solidarity in the COVID-19 space of emergency - Episode Two. By Michelle Lancione & Abdul Maliq Simone, March 20, 2020
Will cities stay healthy, or will the coronavirus mean the end of density?, By Alex Bozikovic, The Globe and Mail, March 20, 2020
Outbreaks like coronavirus start in and spread from the edges of the cities, By Roger Keil, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, February 17, 2020
New York’s built environment was shaped by pandemics, By James Nevius, March 19, 2020
Cities after coronavirus: how Covid-19 could radically alter urban life, By Jack Shenker, The Guardian, March 26, 2020
The importance of urban green in times of epidemics, By Ares Kalandides, April 11, 2020
In the coronavirus crisis, who gets to be outside?, By Alissa Walker, Curbed, Updated March 30, 2020
The Power of Parks in a Pandemic, By John Surico, CityLab, April 9, 2020
A Billion People Live in Slums. Can They Survive the Virus?, By Lee W. Riley, Eva Raphael, and Robert Snyder, New York Times, April 8, 2020
Pandemics and the future of urban density: Michael Hooper on hygiene, public perception and the “urban penalty”, By Michael Cooper, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, April 13, 2020
Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19, By David Harvey, March 19, 2020
Mike Davis on Coronavirus Politics, The Dig, March 20, 2020
Going Viral: The Mother of all Pandemics (Spanish flu), By Hannah Mawdsley and Mark Honigsbaum, 2018
When viruses become pandemics, By George Miller, March 2020
Dig: Surviving This Plague with Amy Kapczynski and Gregg Gonsalves. Jacobin Radio. April 3, 2020
Coronavirus, climate change, and living in states of emergency. Podcast on KCRW hosted by Warren Olney. March 19, 2020