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DRC

Germany

South Africa

South Korea

Viral Atmosphere Project

Field Stories

Mobility Regimes of Pandemic Preparedness and Response: The Case of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic ****dramatically shows how the emergence and global proliferation of pathogens are closely interrelated with different types of human and nonhuman mobilities. Countries are addressing the disease threat posed by the pandemic with varying approaches to restrictions and surveillance of movement with yet unknown social, economic, and political outcomes. This project argues that the individual and collective costs of immobilization – and the privileges of mobility – are distributed unevenly within and across countries. It approaches these disparities by examining pandemic preparedness and response as a mobility regime in which im/mobilities are governed by complex actors, networks, technologies, and scientific expertise.

Our project explores these mobility regimes through an ethnographic study of the diversity of lived experiences of various instances of im/mobilization in a globalized world. Our team focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Germany, and South Korea to explore how mobility regimes have emerged historically at our research sites, and how COVID-19 shapes new mobility regimes by enforcing immobilities – and granting movement – over different phases of the pandemic. These case studies offer unique insights into countries with and without previous experience with recent epidemic outbreaks, and represent a broad range of low-, middle- and high-income countries in the Global South and Global North.

Pandemic Pedagogies: Lessons from Global Disruptions

Widang Hall(Bldg. 527) 616 Yonsei University, Seoul, 10.April. - 12.April. 2026

We forget more than we remember. But what does it mean to remember past pandemics and prepare for the unknown? What if preparedness inherently involves both remembering and forgetting?

Hosted by Yonsei University's Department of Cultural Anthropology, Pandemic Pedagogies: Lessons from Global Disruptions confronts these paradoxes through an incisive exploration of pandemics. It reflects on what we have learned and forgotten from the COVID-19 pandemic, and connects these insights to other, often overlooked, epidemics.

Presenting key findings from four years of collaborative research on mobility regimes and pandemic preparedness—funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung—this conference opens new dialogues on urban infrastructure, affective politics, and aspirations for decolonizing anthropology and global health.

If sustained global collaboration is essential for understanding pandemic experiences, what kinds of labor and modes of working are viable and just? By sharing how researchers at different stages and positionalities have influenced and supported one another, this conference envisions coalitional ways of learning and thinking together with the not-yet-fully-known.

Sponsored by Volkswagen Stiftung, and Yonsei University

Hosted by the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Yonsei University

Co-hosted by Korean Society for Medical Anthropology, Institute for the Comparative Studies of Society and Culture, and CLIO Institute for Social Development Studies

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