New study to explore the politics of plagues
For political scientist Emily Nacol, ideas and viruses have a lot in common—both pass from person to person, spreading rapidly and across great distances, often with big implications for society and government.
Nacol studies risk and the spread of contagious ideas such as the financial panics that spur stock market crashes. Now the assistant professor of political science is turning her attention to biological contagions with a new study that will investigate how fictional plague accounts can inform policy response to real life contagions like SARS, HIV/AIDS and the novel coronavirus.
“A big part of risk research is about epidemiology,” says Nacol, whose work attracts an interdisciplinary audience of political and historical scholars, as well as climate catastrophe and disaster response experts and even zombie film fans. “Any sort of social phenomenon that’s out of control or risky is described as contagion-like. Plague can be used as a metaphor to describe anything that we suffer collectively that is out of control.
“I’m interested in how people behave under conditions of deep uncertainty and fear.”
Nacol’s new project will survey fictional plague accounts from antiquity to modern literature, including works like The History of the Peloponnesian War by the Athenian historian Thucydides, A Journal of a Plague Year by Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Dafoe and Blindness by Portuguese writer José Saramago.
The study expands on concepts taught in Nacol’s political theory seminar course Plagues and Political Thought which used fiction to explore big questions about how institutions and communities respond to contagion.
“There is a common plague narrative—where did it come from, who brought it and what do we know about them,” Nacol says. “Almost every plague story copes with the question of whether quarantine is effective, and whether it is politically and morally just. Every novel has a scene where public officials debate when and what to tell the public.”
Nacol is particularly interested in how contagion affects marginalized people. “In this literature, everyone is vulnerable, but the situation exacerbates and heightens existing vulnerabilities,” she says. “The burden is often most heavily born by the already sick and suffering.”
“Fiction is a form of political thinking,” Nacol continues. “Some people see ‘A Plague Year’ as a barely fictionalized account of the great plague of London, while others see it as an extended metaphor for capitalism.”
“These stories are about how governments cope with disaster, and represent the struggle of humans to learn and make decisions under terrible conditions,” she explains. “These are huge questions for democracies and literature helps to get at these ideas.”
Nacol’s study, “Writing about Plague: Contagion and Imagination in the History of Political Thought,” is supported by the Research and Scholarly Activity Fund from U of T Mississauga’s Research Office.