COVID-19 Science and Society Resources

Like nearly everyone around the globe, daily life at the Center for Science and Society has been uprooted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us were looking for ways to help, options for teaching our children, and sometimes, an escape from it all. Please feel free to contact us with any additional resources. 

These links direct you to an external website. While resources have been vetted, the Center for Science and Society is not responsible for any content on the page.

This page was last updated in December 2021. 

  • #CoronavirusSyllabus developed by president of the Social Science Research Council, Alondra Nelson, and crowdsourced from hundreds of instructors and scholars. Includes relevant articles and books, symposia, podcasts, film, and other resources for teaching this moment in higher education.
  • COVID-19 Ethics: Health, Inequality, and Justice is a teaching, research, and practice resource from the Columbia University Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics.
  • COVID-19 Forum from Somatosphere, a science, medicine, and anthropology journal. They are continuously updating their archive of essays, Dispatches from the pandemic. 
  • Crises of Democracy Curriculum, created in 2019, examines threats to democracy through the prism of cultural trauma. This teaching resource was developed by Columbia University in partnership with four global universities.
  • Mini-lectures in science and anthropology developed by CSS Affiliated Faculty member Paige West and Zoë Wool.
  • Pandemic Syllabus is a historical look at pandemics, public health, and infectious-disease control developed by David Barnes, Merlin Chowkwanyun and Center Interim Director Kavita Sivaramakrishnan. 
  • Virtual Campus is an online resource for Columbia and Barnard students with social games and ideas for the general public along with Columbia-specific health resources. 
  • For more ideas, search for #coronavirussyllabus or #teachthevirus on your social media platform of choice. 
  • Join the COVID-19 Citizen Science Study led by the University of California, San Francisco.
  • Play Foldit, a computer game from the University of Washington asking players to design proteins that can latch onto the novel coronavirus and block its entry into cells.

News organizations that have lowered their paywall for COVID-19 coverage include

Other COVID-19 publications include

For COVID-19 apps and risk assessment, the following resources are available

  • COVID-19 Exposure Notification app. Several state health departments across the country have created COVID-19 contact tracing apps which will provide exposure notifications if one has been in contact with a carrier of the virus.
  • Brown University's MyCOVIDRisk App provides users with an estimated risk of their activities based on variables like location and crowd size.
  • The National Institute on Ageing has developed the COVID-19 Visit Risk Decision Aid, a 10-minute quiz will help users understand the risks associated with visiting relatives for the holidays and how to minimize these risks by providing an individual report.

General Science and Society Resources

Other Library Collections:

Research Guides

Library Subject Specialist in History of Science and Technology: Meredith Levin. Other subject specialists can be viewed via the Columbia Libraries website. 

View the Sophie & Alex Rosner Seminar on Health, History & Social Justice Seminar Series video archive from the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health.