In response to COVID-19, Carleton University swiftly developed an internal funding opportunity to provide seed funding for individuals or teams of researchers for original, innovative, and time-sensitive research to propose solutions to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, or to apply to external research grant competitions targeting the COVID-19 pandemic. The research had to have the potential to contribute to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, or to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and/or its negative consequences on people and communities. The grant was open to all full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
The History Department is proud to congratulate one of our own members, Professor David Dean, for winning one of these new grants. Please find below information on the project that Prof. Dean will be undertaking. (The full list of winners can be found online.)
About Prof. David Dean’s project: “Experiencing COVID-19 Through Science and Technology: Adjusting, Adapting, Innovating”
This project documents how people have adjusted their lives to the realities of home-bound living during COVID-19 through the lens of science and technology. This lens has become integral to our understanding of everyday experiences of COVID-19: How much are we relying on science and how are we depending on new and old technologies? How have people adjusted their expectations of daily life during their experience of social distancing, of lockdown, and of quarantine? What adaptations have they been forced to contemplate and put into effect? How have they needed to innovate in their use of technologies in everyday life? By creating an archive of changes in domestic and other home-based technologies, and generating content for future exhibitions (virtual/physical) associated with the Carleton Centre for Public History and Ingenium, our project will help individuals, families, communities, and institutions learn from this experience and prepare for future outbreaks and new pandemics.