Our Mission
The Viral Conjunctures Group is part of a larger research project, entitled “Viral Conjunctures: Pandemics and Planetary Health Narratives,” headed by Heike Härting (Université de Montréal) and supported with an Insight Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SHRCC). Our collective work examines not only what the humanities can offer to conversations typically dominated by the social, natural, and life sciences, but we also foreground how humanities research shifts, deepens, and problematizes evidence-based research methodologies in favour of storied and participatory evidence-informed methods. In this endeavour, we follow the Martinican philosopher, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire’s insight that “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (“Poetry and Knowledge” 17). We thus position literature, culture, and the arts not as supplemental to scientific understanding, but as essential tools for interpreting the lived, symbolic, and political dimensions of pandemics and planetary health.
Bringing together the health humanities with the emerging field of planetary literary and cultural studies, our group approaches pandemics and the planet as deeply interconnected phenomena through which we reflect on global systems of inequality, ecological vulnerability, and cultural transformation. We ask: How are pandemics experienced and narrated across different geopolitical and social contexts? And how do these narratives shape new understandings of the planet and the latter’s conditions of habitability?
The Viral Conjunctures group is particularly interested in how creative media—flash fiction, poetry, video art, bioart, fiction, and film—develop new ways of sensing, imagining, and archiving the pandemic experience. To document these methods and contents, we are building a Viral Portal that will give access to numerous resources on pandemic narratives.