‘Covid-19 and Me’. A Serendipitous Teaching and Learning Opportunity in a 1st Year Undergraduate Medical Anthropology Course

Abstract

‘Covid-19 and Me’ was an affective learning blog post exercise assigned to 1st year undergraduate students taking a medical anthropology module at the start of academic year 2020-21.  We describe the way in which a collective analysis of the accounts was undertaken and how these were presented and discussed in a set of online and face-to-face seminars. We discuss whether Covid-19 was indeed a ‘portal’ in Arundhati Roy’s use of the term, arguing that it was the written reflection and collective anthropological analysis of their accounts, rather than the virus itself, that enabled students to ‘imagine the world anew’.