CE Updates

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Critical Engagements and this blog are run by a small if unusually dedicated staff who have been scrambling, like the rest of the world, to keep up in the midst of the coronavirus crisis. We’re professors and parents trying to create and manage the headspinning transition to online learning and online everything. So we want to take a moment to observe or announce three things.

First, when we created Critical Engagements and began planning its annual themes in 2017, we could hardly have envisioned a “Question That Matters” quite so comprehensively as the coronavirus, or that engages our past and future topics this directly and urgently. A list of the themes makes the point for us:

The dots don’t need much connecting but COVID-19 has made us think in new ways about boundaries and people on the move; it has lots of people talking about the end of the world (and using the word ‘apocalyptic’ with unusual frequency); it has been the subject of both brilliant reporting and fatally misleading claims; and it has reminded us of what it means to be human in the midst of a crisis.

Second, because of the scramble and the teaching in particular, we haven’t been able to update this site in the way we’d hoped. Just when fake news (and its opposite) become more urgent than ever, we’ve not only had to cancel this year’s remaining events but also have had to interrupt our regular updates to the blog. This is, to be sure, a minor irony among the many that have emerged with the virus: our urge to be among and with our people, physically, or to be out on the streets or in homes or shelters doing what we can to help — all these turn out to be exactly what we can’t do now. So we apologize, and announce here our resolution to make it right as soon as we can. [Update: See our new course, “Perspectives on Pandemics,” for a down payment on this promise.]

Third, we’re also delighted to announce that part of the solution has already arrived, in the form of a generous offer of help from Bryan Whitledge of CMU’s Clarke Historical Library. Regular CE followers will know Bryan already from previous posts, panels, and events, but we’re especially glad that he’s offered his own expertise in archives and (sometimes fake) news, to help keep us and our readers up to date. Stay tuned, then, for guest posts from Bryan and the Clarke.