Keywords Now Pandemic

Edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler

How has the COVID pandemic altered our use of key terms that shape our understanding of that event and its aftermath?

Raymond Williams famously wrote that his Keywords project emerged from his almost visceral sense upon returning from fighting in World War II that the meaning of the word “culture” had changed in his absence. From that gut feeling came decades of research and rumination on the meaning of “culture,” its shifting relation to the term “society,” and then a developing understanding of “keywords” as terms that register and participate in broad semantic and political shifts.