In our opening public lecture, we will take up the immediate context of the 2020 election to consider what is at stake in COVID-19 and the recent uprisings around Black Lives Matter and racial injustice for the United States? We will draw upon Arundhati Roy's concept of the "pandemic as portal," in which she writes: "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next." As we approach these unprecedented, overlapping crises of public health, racism, economic decline and environmental breakdown, we must ask fundamental questions of what we need to leave behind in order to build what must come next.

Recorded on 08/31/2020. (#36274)