Covid-19 and the Crisis of Care
At this time, individuals with active NYU IDs will be granted in-person access to this event. Individuals must show the Daily Screener green pass screen prior to entry. All other audience members are invited to join the event via Zoom. Please RSVP HERE for Zoom and RSVP above for in-person. We hope to have all of our audience members back in-person with us very soon.
The Institute for Public Knowledge invites you to join a conversation on COVID-19 and the Crisis of Care. The event is moderated by Eric Klinenberg featuring Jessica Calarco, Katha Pollitt, and Michelle Cera.
The Covid-19 pandemic created a crisis of care that disproportionately impacted women but also rippled through families, communities, and social institutions of all kinds. In this public conversation, Indiana University sociologist Jessica Calarco joins (the writer/poet) Katha Pollitt and NYU doctoral student Michelle Cera to discuss how gendered expectations about domestic work shaped the American pandemic experience. They will analyze the sources of inequality and potential solutions for addressing the lasting harm it has caused.
Jessica Calarco is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research program focuses on systems of inequality, how policies and institutions cater to those with power and privilege while disadvantaging others. Calarco’s first book, Negotiating Opportunities (Oxford, 2018), won the Pierre Bourdieu Award for the best book in the sociology of education. Her second book, A Field Guide to Grad School (Princeton University Press, 2020), received a starred review from the Library Journal and originated with a Twitter thread that decoded the hidden curriculum of higher education. Calarco’s forthcoming book, Without a Net, is under contract with Portfolio/Penguin and combines data from Calarco’s research with parents of young children with insights from other scholars to reveal why the U.S. does not have an adequate social safety net and what we lose without the net we need.
Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist, and critic. Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the ridiculous and the sublime. Her “Subject to Debate” column, which debuted in 1995 and which the Washington Post called “the best place to go for original thinking on the left,” appears regularly in The Nation. “Subject to Debate” won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary in 2003, and was a finalist in 2013. Pollitt is also the recipient of the American Sociological Association Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues. She is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at Type Media Center. Pollitt has also written essays and book reviews for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Harper’s, Ms., Glamour, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC and the BBC. Her work has been republished in many anthologies and is taught in many university classes. Her most recent book is Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.
Michelle Cera is a third-year Ph.D. student in sociology at New York University. Her studies began at University of California, Berkeley where she studied meme communities on Facebook. Her current dissertation research at New York University explores radical right mobilization on alternative social media platforms such as MeWe, Gab, and 4chan. Michelle also conducts research on parenting during the pandemic. She specializes in digital ethnography. Michelle lives in Brooklyn, NY with her dog, Lenyn.
Eric Klinenberg is Helen Gould Shepard Professor of Social Science and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown, 2018), Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age, co-editor of Antidemocracy in America (Columbia University Press, 2019), and co-author, with Aziz Ansari, of the New York Times #1 bestseller Modern Romance (The Penguin Press, 2015). His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and This American Life.
Photo Credits: Jonathan Cooper