COVID-Calls is a weekly public-facing podcast and historical archive project broadcast via Facebook Live, YouTube Live, and Periscope. Immediately following the live broadcast, the COVIDCalls episode is edited with music and breaks and archived as a podcast, made available via all major podcast platforms.
Created by Scott Gabriel Knowles of the Department of History, Drexel University, COVIDCalls aims to accomplish four goals: (1) Examining in depth topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic relevant to advancing public health, public engagement with history, public understanding of science, antiracism, and public engagement with high-quality social science/humanities research; (2) Amplification of relevant social science disaster research (broadly defined) conducted in the public interest, across disciplines, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic; (3) Facilitating connectivity among disaster researchers and journalists/media professionals in order to bring high quality, in-depth social science into the hands of the working press; and (4) Collecting and disseminating a real-time historical archive of the COVID-19 pandemic as filtered through the lens of disaster research practitioners.