October 9–11, 2026
Covid Legacies: Long-Term Social and Cultural Effects
ANAMED, Beyoğlu (9 October)
Minerva Han, Karaköy (10–11 October)
Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Claire Chambers – University of York
Prof. Önder Ergönül – Koç University
This event will address a significant gap in approaches to the Covid-19 pandemic: its cultural, social, and political impacts, which signal a shift in our everyday lived experience. While the pandemic has long been examined in medical terms or through its immediate effects during the peak of its spread, its representations, political resonances, and longer-term social transformations have received far less attention. The conference Covid Legacies seeks to scrutinise these cultural dimensions and their impact on society. It is scheduled for 9-11 October 2026 to be hosted at ANAMED (in connection with Koç University) and Minerva Han (in connection with Sabancı University).
In Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald coins the term ‘outbreak narratives’ to describe accounts that reveal ‘a fascination not just with the novelty and death of the microbes but also with the changing social formations of a shrinking world’. Covid-19 similarly confronted the world with questions of selfhood and sociability. The imperative to distance ourselves coexisted with the urgent desire for connection. As borders of countries, cities, and even homes closed tightly, digital borders opened wide, generating new forms of virtual intimacy. Fear of the viral in the physical world was counteracted by the experience of ‘going viral’ in the digital one.
The World Health Organization’s definition of ‘infodemic’, as the rapid spread of false and misleading information about the Covid-19 epidemic, which is often based on conspiracy theories and discriminatory stereotypes, is also adopted by social scientists such as Rose Bernard and Tauel Harper. Accordingly, infodemic is also a part of the Covid-19 legacy, since it is still prevalent in many social platforms, pointing to the problems of health and digital literacies, as well as the communication gap between lay people and medical experts.
Our relationship with our bodies was also reshaped during this period—marked at once by anxiety and by practices of care. The invisibility and unknowability of the virus cast the body as a zone of risk, even as its needs for comfort demanded renewed attention. As Sigmund Freud famously argues, illness provokes a ‘narcissistic turn’ toward the body. During the covid period, this also meant exploring what feels good for our bodies, and paying attention to our needs without being always on display. Yet these transformations were never equally distributed: while some enjoyed the privilege of working from home or adapting to hybrid modes, others did not. The pandemic further exposed inequalities in whose lives were valued, mourned, or— as Judith Butler phrases it—regarded as ‘grievable’. Rethinking biopolitics and health risks in relation to the different measures that the countries took against the pandemic also refers to political, economic and social inequalities at global and local levels, as these inequalities increased and became more visible in the implementation of the measures. In many countries, including Turkey, many people criticised these measures as too strict, finding them oppressive and controlling, rather than a medical necessity.
Illness, as understood by scholars in medicine and the medical humanities, health care workers, as well as by patients and carers, is never only a medical matter. It is always social and political, shaping lived experience through structures of gender, sexuality, class, race, religion, location, and historical context—and through the stories we tell, hear, and share. As Arthur Frank writes in his germinal The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, ‘Illness becomes a circulation of stories, professional and lay, but not all stories are equal’. Illness narratives also reveal social and cultural tensions, as Lawrence Cohen indicates, as the younger generations blame the elderly generations for providing such a habitat that the COVID-19 virus could be generated and spread, as a result of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation and environmental pollution, which harmed the ecosystem irreversibly.
Keeping in mind that issues of health are deeply ideological, political, and narrativised, in the conference Covid Legacies, we draw on the fields of literature, history, anthropology, sociology, art history, media studies, and medicine to foster a dialogue on how the coronavirus pandemic has transformed our lived experience and how such experience has been represented to this date.
In this context, this conference calls for papers that discuss the pandemic of coronavirus and its after impacts with a focus on literary and artistic representations, bodily practices, inequalities, digital and political cultures, and pandemic memory to understand Covid-19 as a social and cultural turning point. Some of the questions that the papers can focus on, but are not limited to, are:
- How has Covid-19 been represented in cultural products? How has it affected the form or the content in contemporary works?
- How have cultural narratives and artistic representations shaped our understanding of Covid 19 beyond its medical framing?
- In what ways has the pandemic transformed our relationship to the body—as a site of danger and care?
- How has the closure of physical borders and the expansion of digital ones reshaped sociability, intimacy, and community?
- What inequalities has Covid-19 exposed in terms of whose lives are valued, mourned, or rendered ‘grievable’?
- How have literature, media, and the arts recorded the affective experiences of isolation, loss, and resilience?
We invite presenters to submit an abstract of 250 words and a bio of 100 words. Please send abstracts and bios in a single document to covidlegacies@gmail.com by 30 June 2026. Free to attend for all speakers and attendees.
Organised by:
Asst. Prof. Şima İmşir, Koç University
Assoc. Prof. Ayşecan Terzioğlu, Sabancı University
Scientific Committee:
Prof. Önder Ergönül, Koç University
Prof. Claire Chambers, University of York
Prof. Fatih Artvinli, Acıbadem University
Prof. Sibel Sakarya, Koç University
Assoc. Prof. Çağla Aydın, Sabancı University
Assoc. Prof. Başak Can, Koç University
Assoc Prof. Zeynep Gülru Göker, Sabancı University
Assoc. Prof. Çimen Günay Erkol, Özyeğin University
Assoc. Prof. İlker Kayı, Koç University
Assoc. Prof. Yeşim Yasin, Acıbadem University
Assoc. Prof. Nükhet Varlık, Rutgers University
Asst. Prof. Burcu Alkan, Yeditepe University
Asst. Prof. Kenan Behzat Sharpe, Sabancı University