The U.S. COVID-19 pandemic produced the highest reported rates of COVID-19 deaths and deep social divisions. Based on an ethnographic study of how the pandemic affected health professionals and laypersons alike, this lecture draws on a new framework for decolonizing perspectives on language and medicine.
U.S. Health authorities demanded that laypersons passively assimilate pandemic knowledge produced by leading professionals. Nevertheless, the growing emphasis on self-interested, rational, and agentive health subjects clashed with uncertainties regarding COVID-19 science and demands that laypersons provide most COVID-19 care, producing not a communicable consensus but feelings of incommunicability —communicative failure and distrust — on the part of health professionals as well as laypersons.
About 
Charles L. Briggs is chair of the Folklore Graduate Program, codirector of the Medical Anthropology Program, codirector of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, and the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor of Folklore in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including Learning How to Ask, Stories in the Time of Cholera, Making Health Public, and Tell Me Why My Children Died. He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, and the Cultural Horizons Prize, as well as prestigious fellowships. Here you can read more about Briggs.
The lecture is a cooperation between Bodies in Translation: Science, Knowledge and Sustainability in Cultural Translation - Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages and SHE.