Special issue on Lessons learnt from a pandemic: COVID-19 in perspective

This Special Issue on ‘Lessons learnt from a pandemic’ presents the voluntary collaboration of the entire cohort of first-year medical anthropology master’s students at the University of Oxford during the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020-2021 academic year. All lectures, seminars, supervisions and tutorials were held through e-communication during the several months of lockdown. Hence this joint project was envisaged specifically as a way of creating a community while in lockdown, welcoming personal initiative and fostering resilience in this extraordinary year. In medical anthropology at Oxford, a 2500-word essay is written weekly in term time, and tutorials in critical medical anthropology alternate with others on ecological approaches to biomedicine. In the first trimester of this year, of the three essay prompts, every week students could choose one addressing COVID-19. These essays were single-authored, and the students received feedback on them in the tutorials. They were then asked to resubmit their essays either revised on their own or in co-authorship in the following term