How has the SARS-CoV2 pandemic affected China? Three experts in public health in China will host a roundtable conversation to consider the pandemic from a variety of perspectives: administrative preparedness, enhanced social controls, socioeconomic impacts, gender roles, community relations, grassroots organizing, state-society relations, human-animal relations, zoonotic transfer, vaccine development and delivery, etc. This lively and interactive conversation aims to engage questions and contributions from the audience.
Miriam Gross is an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma, Norman. She is the author of Farewell to the God of Plague: Chairman Mao’s Campaign to Deworm China (University of California Press, 2016). Her research focuses on the popularization, politicization, and contestation of science and medicine in the countryside in modern China as well as China’s medical diplomacy abroad. Currently she is writing a book on COVID-19 that explores its roots in China and analyzes comparative global management and control strategies.
Nicole Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of History and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of the award-winning book, Intimate Communities: Wartime Healthcare and the Birth of Modern China, 1937-1945, published with University of California Press in 2018. She is currently writing a social history of night soil and toilets in modern China.
Katherine Mason is a medical anthropologist who conducts ethnographic fieldwork in China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in medical anthropology, population health, bioethics, China studies, and reproductive, mental and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the professionalization and ethics of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016.
