Bearing Witness: The Covid-19 & Inequality History Documentation Project is an effort by the Columbia University Center for Science and Society’s Research Cluster on Race, Inequality and Health to document and interpret the events associated with the novel coronavirus epidemic in the United States as it pertains especially to racialized minorities and issues of structural inequality and racism. Led by Samuel Kelton Roberts, PhD (Associate Professor of History, Sociomedical Sciences, and African-American and African Diaspora Studies), the Cluster team is actively constructing a series of timelines of the US epidemic, each covering a trimester. The interactive timelines presents principally four types of events: data events, political events, policy events, and scientific events.
In addition to the timelines, the website also includes a growing, curated bibliography of primary and secondary sources to contextualize the current moment. These sources include reports, academic and non-academic studies, hearings, news articles, opinion pieces, various audiovisual sources, and others. The Cluster team anticipates that the Bearing Witness project will have several important applications, including assisting historians and others to think about Covid-19 as an unfolding drama and aiding high school and university instructors to develop interactive teaching units related to coronavirus, health disparities, mass incarceration, and social determinants of health.
Research & Production Team
Bearing Witness is a research project by the Columbia University Center for Science and Society’s Research Cluster on Race, Inequality and Health. Dr. Samuel Kelton Roberts is the Cluster leader. Please send any questions, comments, or suggestions to raceandhealth@columbia.edu.
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