The Humanities in an Age of Neoliberal Disruption

The coronavirus pandemic has had a catastrophic impact on the social, economic, political, and technological landscape, leading to an unprecedented scale of disruption. As of altering our modes of working, living, communicating, and interacting with one another, Covid-19 has drastically unsettled our traditional sense-making of our world. It has also exacerbated structural inequalities and racial injustices. At the start of the outbreak, for example, social distancing measures adopted as governmental responses to the virus quickly became interpreted as “social othering” with the stigmatising, first of ethnic Chinese and Asian populations and then of migrant communities. In spite of the fact that it is clear that viruses respect neither class boundaries nor ethnicities, in societies that are racialised, the polarising vitriol associated with Covid-19 has revealed the extent to which perceived differences between peoples and groups can be subsequently easily exploited and played up to uphold the status quo. The coronavirus is indeed not the only phenomenon that has disrupted and destabilised our world. Ecological devastation, the waning of democracy and its institutions, the rise of neoliberal capitalism and its focus on profit rather than resilience and sustainability, escalating religious conflicts, wars, xenophobia and racism, and the continuing oppression of minority groups already signal a world in deep crisis.