COVID Exceptionalism is an interdisciplinary, virtual unconference focused on the pandemic at the intersections of public health, technology, the arts and humanities.  This event and companion online archive aims to critically reflect on the present moment both as a mirror of systemic inequalities—race, gender, class—and as a means of radical transformations –educational and economic, scientific and medical, cultural and interpersonal.

This virtual unconference will interrogate “COVID exceptionalism” as well as the extraordinary changes we are experiencing in every sector of human life and experience. What is exceptional about covid? And for whom?  What has truly changed, and what is being revealed for what it always was? Which of the profound changes to our modes of life should be fought, and which should be accepted as a change for the better? What new technologies, living arrangements, modes of governance, and models of care have emerged, and will they outlast this critical moment in our history?

The unconference will take place on Saturday, May 15th. Alongside it we will host an expansive online archive of the detritus of the epidemic — the traces left in the form of medical bills, journal entries, memorials to the lost, poems, songs, discarded masks, artworks, vaccine stickers, eviction notices, loan statements, protest banners, prescription bottles, denied visa applications, administrative emails mandating protocols, memes, children’s drawings….