Throughout the current history, the “COVID-19” and “post-COVID-19” eras represent the most significant events in the last seventy years (except for the breakthrough of 1989). The “COVID-19” and “post-COVID-19” eras are, however, potentially more important milestones in the global history of the 20th and 21st history than the 1989 events. The COVID-19 pandemic is frequently compared with the “Spanish flu”; and the COVID-19 pandemic´s impact on the economy due to the surge in inflation and COVID-19-driven public debts is just the tip of the iceberg. As one hundred years ago, there is a large synergistic problem in much of the world. Societies have been facing multiple and simultaneous crises (pandemic, environmental, ideological, supply chain, and demographic).
The impact of the crisis is not only strongly negative (death toll, economic collapse, poverty, and the strain on public and administrative structures) but also positive (an instrument for technological and political changes and an expansion of the institutional framework for supporting the basic research and innovation in the public and private spheres). We aim to combine the aforementioned previous international experiences with research for social change in the context of the Czech Republic and use interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative methods across selected social and human sciences.
Therefore, the Institute of Contemporary History of the CAS has already started with an independent collection of basic data in the spring of 2020 and created a database of authentic testimonies from the COVID-19 pandemic (available only in Czech). From 2022 to 2024, the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences coordinates an interdisciplinary project in which two other Institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences participate (the Institute of Sociology, and the Institute of Psychology). Other Czech Academy of Sciences Institute (the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry) has funded this project since 2022. The project outputs’ summary can be found on this regularly updated website.
Contact
Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i.
Vlašská 355/9
118 00 Praha 1
e-mail: covid@usd.cas.cz
