"COVID Societies: What is the place of the social sciences and humanities in pandemic times?"

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the world. As the temporal horizon of the pandemic moves into years, and perhaps decades, however, it becomes clear that there are more than medical and scientific questions at stake, both in the pandemic and in our response to it. Learning to live with COVID also means identifying, understanding and tackling the social, cultural, political, ethical and environmental shifts emerging from the pandemic. This means, in turn, that research from experts in the social sciences and humanities will increasingly move towards the forefront of how we respond to the pandemic – sometimes in collaboration with clinical and scientific research, but sometimes under its own steam too. In this online roundtable, we draw together social science and humanities expertise from Exeter University to situate COVID-19 as a crisis that is posing major questions to research in these disciplines.