Covid in Iowa with Emily Mendenhall
Episode 78 - September 17, 2021
Emily Mendenhall (Georgetown University) joins Merle and Lee to discuss Covid in her hometown in northwest Iowa. The conversation begins with a definition and reflection on the idea of syndemic, then gravitates towards Emily’s own experiences returning to her hometown of Okoboji during Covid. Emily uses the Okoboji case study to disentangle issues within the broader American response to Covid – ranging from the politicization of the question, to the personal and communal interactions and interests, as well as the common values in the community that influenced the overall response of Okoboji to Covid. The interview ends with a few reflections on potential ways forward.
Further Reading
- Mendenhall, Emily. Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji. Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.
- Mendenhall, Emily. How an Iowa summer resort region became a Covid-19 hot spot. Aug. 8, 2020.
- Adam D. Koon et al., “A Spectrum of (Dis)Belief: Coronavirus Frames in a Rural Midwestern Town in the United States,” Social Science & Medicine 272 (March 1, 2021): 113743.
- Emily Mendenhall and Gravlee, Clarence, “How COVID, Inequality and Politics Make a Vicious Syndemic,” Scientific American, August 26. 2021.
- Emily Mendenhall, “The COVID-19 Syndemic Is Not Global: Context Matters,” The Lancet 396, no. 10264 (November 28, 2020): 1731.
- Nora Kenworthy, Adam D. Koon, and Emily Mendenhall, “On Symbols and Scripts: The Politics of the American COVID-19 Response,” Global Public Health 16, no. 8–9 (September 2, 2021): 1424–38.
Our Guest
Emily Mendenhall
Professor – Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service – Georgetown University
