Mecila
17 May

[2022] Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

Nisia Trindade (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz -Fiocruz)

Online

About the event

Joint Lecture Series
Making Sense of the Post-Covid World: Continuities and Changes

26 April 2022 – 19 July 2022
Tuesdays 1:00 p.m. (Rio de Janeiro), 6:00 p.m. (Berlin and Hamburg)

The pandemic has produced ambivalent consequences for social life. Intersectional inequalities, combining, class, ethno-racial, citizenship, and gender inequalities, both between and within countries, grew during the pandemic and became even more difficult to be mitigated in the post-covid world. At the same time, the global virus has irrefutably revealed the high level of interdependency between different social groups, world regions, as well as between human and nonhuman living beings. However, this did not lead to more solidarity at the national and global level as individualistic and antagonistic responses to the pandemic have created and exacerbated divisions and divides. At the same time, these glaring problems came to the fore and demands to tackle them have grown.

This series of lectures seeks to discuss these ambivalent and long-lasting effects of the pandemic on societies: What has been the impact on social inequality and how does this affect the transformation prospects especially of poor countries? What is the impact of the global virus on world politics? How have the pandemic affected the sense of solidarity at the local, national, and global level? How does the global experience of living with and fighting the pandemic affect the treatment of issues concerning the planet’s common future, such as climate change?

To address these questions, the Institute for Social and Political Studies (IESP/Rio de Janeiro), the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS/ Hamburg) and the Institute of Latin American Studies (LAI /FU Berlin) have invited eight experts from different fields of social sciences to give digital lectures followed by debates with the audience. The lectures will take place between April and July 2022 and will be interposed by internal preparatory sessions at each of the organizing institutes. The series of events is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation within the framework of the Anneliese Meier Research Award conferred to Prof. Domingues, one of the convenors of this lecture series.

 

 

 

 

 

17 May 2022:
Impacts of the Pandemic on Global Health and Vital Inequalities, Nisia Trindade (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz))

A new generation of severe inequalities in human development is emerging even if many of the unresolved of the 20th century are declining. This persistence of inequality, despite the improvement of many indicators, is a phenomenon that ended up being exacerbated in the pandemic scenario. It not only induced a public health crisis, but also has led to severe economic, social, and educational crisis. Therefore, we can see the pandemic as a global total social fact, because it affected all dimensions of social life. Science and technology can help shape the way in which societies control disease, so research and development should respond to priority health needs. This is why one great challenge to overcome is the inequality of knowledge, innovation, and the production base, because without a more symmetrical distribution of productive and innovation capacities, national and global responses based on universality and equity will become unfeasible.

Nisia Trindade Lima is the current President of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz). Holding a PhD in Sociology and a master’s degree in Political Science, she is now on her second mandate as the President of the Fiocruz and is the first woman to occupy this position in its 120 years of history. Linked to Brazilian Ministry of Health, Fiocruz is the largest Public Health Academic Institution in Latin American and the Caribbean Region. She is a senior researcher at Fiocruz’s Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, postgraduate professor in the History of Science and Health Program, as well as a collaborating professor on the Graduate Program in Sociology at IESP/UERJ. Trindade is also an associate professor of Sociology at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). In December 2020 she was elected full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) in the Social Sciences category, and in January 1st 2022 she became a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) for the advancement of science in developing countries. Nisia committed and is paying great attention to expanding Fiocruz’ role in the global health community. She also participated and supported the FIOCRUZ activities that contribute to the ECOSOC – High-Level Political Forum for Sustainable Development on different topics. She has also participated in the two editions of the WHO Global Research and Innovation Forum, in February and July of 2020. In September, she was awarded the degree of Knight of the National Order of the Legion of Honor of France, offered by the Government of France, in recognition of her work in the fields of science and health and for the services rendered to society in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Registrations via zoom.