What Is Critical and What Is Hidden in the Time Of COVID-19?

Questions of what or who is critical to managing the COVID-19 pandemic have been at the heart of media discussion, public recognition, and government policy on a global scale. Such concerns – of what constitutes critical workers, material resources, public services, and community responses – are being addressed and prioritised at local and national levels in different ways, even as collective anxieties over the COVID-19 pandemic vie for attention with other social, economic, or political crises in given places.

In this context, it becomes important to consider what is hidden or unseen amid a global pandemic, of how individuals, communities and other key workers are excluded from ‘frontline’ imaginings of crisis and pandemic.

Drawing on research expertise and insights from Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, and India, this Critical Issues panel event – brough to you by the University of Melbourne – will explore these issues, asking what is both critical and hidden in the time of COVID-19 – on Thursday, 4 November 2021 at 5.30 PM AEDT.

Find out more here.