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Gerry Canavan, Jennifer Cooke and Caroline Edwards in conversation with Paul March-Russell
The following conversation was conducted via Google Docs between 1st May and 23rd June 2020. The participants were Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough University) and Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck College, London). Gerry is President of the SFRA; his books include Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), co-edited with Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia E. Butler (2016), and most recently The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), co-edited with Eric Carl Link. Jennifer is a poet and academic; her first book was on Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009) while her most recent is Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (2020). Caroline's books include Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019) and, with Tony Venezia, China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015); she is also editor of Alluvium and co-founder with Martin Eve of the Open Library of Humanities.
Paul March-Russell: Can I ask, how have you all been coping during the pandemic? My responses have ranged from anxiety to acceptance, probably spurred-on by having a very busy household. Yet at the same time there's no one, universal experience, so how has it been for you?
Jennifer Cooke: As an academic, with a house and a garden, I am privileged and I already spend a lot of time working from home or in libraries so that was not a challenge. I'm also on research leave, which has saved me, so far, from the scrabble to take all teaching online, although I do not think we will return fully to face-to-face teaching in October so I probably have all that ahead. Research leave has been disrupted by the closure of the British Library, of course, but there are aspects of my plans I can complete. Emotionally, I was extremely anxious at the start of cases in the UK because of the government's slow response, the horrifying herd immunity strategy, and the presence of the arrogant assumption that somehow we would not be subject to the ravages of the disease in the same way other countries were. Lives were lost needlessly. I was angry and anxious about that, but oddly calm about the way the disease would itself unfold and what needed to happen....