Honorary Doctor lecture at Faculty of Arts: After Covid: Signposts and Moral Imperatives

Lenore Manderson current research in South Africa includes work on informal caregiving and aging in rural settings, and explorations of art, science and community engagement approaches to water, energy and food in the context of climate change. She has trained to graduation some 170 higher degree students. She is widely published, with her works including Surface Tensions (2011, on surgery and bodily change) and Viral Loads (2021, on COVID-19). She is editor of the journal Human Organization, and founded and edits a book series on medical anthropology for Rutgers University Press.

Her work as an anthropologist with governments, non-profit and for-profit organisations, and in interdisciplinary settings, has been recognised with the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award (2016), Member of the Order of Australia (AM, 2020), and the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, which honors an outstanding socialscientist in recognition of efforts to understand and serve the needs of the world's societies.

Abstract

Throughout my career, I have focused on tensions between the social and biological, the structural and the physical. I have described how imperialism’s extractive capacity depended on healthy workforces; how ideologies of gender have excused the unequal distribution of power and resources; how colonialism, capitalism and globalization have colluded in oppression and, with human exceptionalism, have created the conditions for planetary collapse. I explore these themes in the context of  contemporary concerns; in doing so, I draw on my work on COVID-19, including my edited books Viral Loads and now Covid’s Chronicities. 

Four years since the beginning of the pandemic, our lives continue to be interrupted by the transmission of the virus and its economic repercussions. Anthropologists had early  appreciated how the pandemic would unfold, exploiting and compounding pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. For applied and public anthropologists, COVID-19 afforded us opportunities to draw on our broad interests and analytic tools to interrogate the persistence of social and political schisms that were distended by the pandemic’s effects. But none of us predicted its far-reaching implications in relation to global order, national governance, the role of the state, or the persistence of discriminatory social structures that shape life chances. 

I reflect on the limits to the public health and fiscal interventions set up in certain settings to manage the pandemic, consider its financial and scientific gains, and revisit features of social and political life which the pandemic laid bare in diverse settings. In considering this, I argue that the pandemic has reinforced our responsibility to act ethically in the face of multiple global crises. This has powerful implications for the social sciences and humanities, for all fields of knowledge production, and the academies which employ us, and for our own roles as moral actors.