pandemic and beyond – serie

This book offers insights into some of the digital innovations, structural adaptations and analogue solutions that enabled live performance in the UK to survive through the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides evidence of values-led policies and practices that have improved the wellbeing of the creative workforce and have increased access to live performance. Through sections that address digital innovations, workforce resilience and programming live performances outdoors and in community settings, this book provides practical insights into the challenges live performance faced during the pandemic. It shows how, in order to survive, individuals and companies within the sector drew on the creativity and resourcefulness of its workforce, and on new and existing networks. In these accounts, the pandemic functioned as catalyst for technological innovations, stock-taking regarding exploitative industry structures, and a re-valuing of the role of live performance for community-building.

A compilation of case studies illustrating how arts, culture and other community assets were used by individuals and communities to cope and develop resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic, demonstrating valuable lessons that might help us develop resilience in similar future crises. Threaded through all the contributions, readers will discover a focus on the experiences and voices of those marginalised during the pandemic, because of their lived experiences of structural inequalities, or due to mental or physical ill-health or age. These are difficult and complex topics, and there are vital lessons here for policy and for practice in the arts and for provision of health and care.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY) licence.

Knowing COVID-19 demonstrates how researchers in the humanities shone a light on some of the many hidden problems of COVID-19, in the very depths of the pandemic crisis. Drawing on eight COVID-19 research projects, the volume shows how humanities researchers, alongside colleagues in the clinical and life sciences, addressed some of the major critical unknowns about this new infectious disease – from the effects of racism to the risks of deploying shame; from how to design an effective instructional leaflet to how to communicate effectively to bus passengers. Across eight novel case studies, the book showcases how humanities research during a pandemic is not only about interpreting the crisis when it has safely passed, but how it can play a vital, collaborative and instrumental role as events are still unfolding.