A Revelatory Pandemic

Political leaders and the news media described the public-health catastrophe of COVID-19 as a crisis, while scholars and public intellectuals portrayed the pandemic as a debacle that would lay bare the inequities and contradictions of an increasingly neoliberal global political economy and usher in an era of progressive, transformative change. Bringing the anthropologies of disaster, epidemics, and crisis into conversation, A Revelatory Pandemic subjects these hopeful expectations of post-pandemic change to social-scientific scrutiny across Latin America and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the causes and outcomes of crisis.

Roberto E. Barrios is Professor of Anthropology and Doris Zemurray Stone Chair of Latin American Studies at the University of New Orleans. He has conducted research on disaster recovery and mitigation in Central America, Mexico, and the United States and is author of Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction (2017, University of Nebraska Press) and co-editor of, Disaster Upon Disaster, with Susanna Hoffman (2022, Berghahn).