When we decided last summer to create an undergraduate course about pandemics, we faced skepticism. Weren’t students and instructors tired of the COVID-19 pandemic? And would looking at pandemics from the perspective of numerous disciplines make it hard to address the topic with depth, or would we achieve a sense of cohesion? As an anthropologist, […] … learn more→

Jodi Benenson and Tara Kolar Bryan are professors in the School of Public Administration at the University of Nebraska Omaha. In the fall of 2020 they coordinated a team-taught graduate-level course called Pandemics, Protest and Policy that centered around public policy and management issues happening in real time. Here, they answer five questions about what they learned. 1. […] … learn more→

Human knowledge of viruses and human bodies has reached the molecular and even atomic scale, yet the past few months has revealed how vulnerable we remain to pandemics. This, in turn, illustrates that for all of humanity’s progress in understanding nature and humanity itself over the past centuries, some of the scientific problems and global […] … learn more→