I was teaching a course I designed, “Death and American Society (Soc 323),” at my campus near New York City in the fall of 2019 shortly before the ominous impacts of COVID-19 began to be felt. Originally designed to use the concept of “death” as a lens through which to investigate the relationship between the self, the social, and death, from a decidedly cultural perspective. Recontextualizing the relationship between self, the social, and death to interrogate the dynamic meaning(s) that define that relationship expanded our consideration to additional spheres, where its traces in sociological theory, politics, religion, industry, identity, consumption, media, and the digital world were illuminated. 

As COVID-19 became endemic (socially and politically as well as epidemiologically), it also haunted us as a poignant reminder of death’s simultaneous certainty and ineffability. The growing crisis and the ubiquity of its impact renewed a need for flexibility in my syllabus. Throughout, I adapted the structure of course delivery and evaluation to accommodate the ever-shifting fears and uncertainties my students brought to the classroom. Engagement through lecture, readings, Socratic seminar, student-led discussion, guest speakers, and multimedia written assignments allowed space for increasingly complex engagement with the question of how a society, and the people constituting it, grapple with the contingencies of a time of plague. 

The practices and stratagems our society has developed for “living with death” urgently need reassessment, relearning, and reengagement.  My course proposes an inquiry towards that objective. Now in its second “post-onset of Covid” iteration, the course has incorporated new ways of investigating such sociological concepts as inequality (who is an “essential worker”, and why do death rates vary?), deviance (how did shame and politics become linked to masks?), and the emotional labor of grieving and bereavement (the abrupt isolation and the death of loved ones).