The Freshman Seminar Program has been designed to provide new students with the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member in a small seminar setting. Freshman seminars are offered in all campus departments, and topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 freshmen.

COVID-19 has introduced radical uncertainty into Berkeley campus life and into our lives in general. The origins, development and future of the disease and how it will impact our lives – travel, schools, work – when we can return to some degree of normality, and what the ‘new normal’ will look like, all deserve serious analysis. Of course, events, models, and predictions change almost daily. But some things are already clear. The world for the most part was unprepared for this pandemic even though it was predicted. Responses to the pandemic have been markedly different among and across nations and regions. The disease is not a great leveler but is inflected through race, class, gender; there are differing patterns of vulnerability and therefore of impact. The economy has been devastated in a way quite different from the 2008 financial crisis and has ramified across the world throwing millions out of work, closing businesses and radically disrupting global supply chains. The progress and impact of the disease across the Global North and South is and will be very different. The virus is here to stay and it will take time not only to develop anti-virals and vaccines but years before we can return to a ‘new normal’. But it is wholly unclear what the new normal will look like. Inevitably the disease has triggered all manner of responses some of which are undercutting and compromising democracy (leaders claiming states of emergency powers), others are exacerbating geopolitical tensions (US-China), and not least ‘pandemic discourses’ are constructed in particular ways, often in racial terms (‘the China virus’). What the future holds – how quickly societies recover, and what the longer term consequences will be for social interaction and travel, international cooperation, the character of public health provision, the global economy, pandemic preparedness – is of course unknown. But it is clear that this COVID-19 is an epochal event which will have enormous implications for how we live our lives. The purpose of the seminar will be to explores these questions beginning with some readings on the corona viruses and earlier research on the likelihood of global pandemics and the relations between changing ecology, political economy and the genesis of cross-species transmission of viruses. We will then turn the questions of the dynamics of the pandemics, patterns of preparedness and response, and the likely longer term consequences – and challenges – of living with COVID-19.

Requisites

• Freshman Students

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