Human crises of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the foundations of our lives and compel questions about the possibilities for our futures. The pandemic—a crisis simultaneously medical, cultural, political, ecological, and economic—has carved new fault-lines within our societies, intensified existing ones, and also opened new possibilities for care and human solidarity. COVID-19 is, or should be, both a “wake up call” (Delanty, 2020) and a “portal” (Roy 2020). The possibilities of a post-COVID world, then, rest not only on questions of vaccination or herd immunity, but on multifaceted, human processes of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. The social sciences and humanities are powerfully placed to inform these processes and the kinds of post-COVID world we may yet inhabit.

In this global, interdisciplinary conference we invite panels and papers that draw from the humanities and social science disciplines to attend to these urgent tasks of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In doing so, we also acknowledge and invite consideration of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic represents only one of many intersecting crises, both acute and ongoing, with which many people and places have had to contend. These include the ongoing crises of settler colonialism and postcoloniality, climate change, ecological destruction, as well as what theorist Lauren Berlant describes as the crisis ordinariness of precarious life in late capitalism. We seek to attend, as well, to the unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability throughout the pandemic, including between the Global South and North.