This programme provides UK and G7-based researchers at any career stage, and active in any discipline within the humanities and social sciences, to submit proposals focused on vaccine engagement, including examples of community confidence and hesitancy in Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany and France.
Aims
COVID-19 is the most challenging health crisis we have faced for decades. Its impacts are changing lives, communities and economies, but these challenges are not new. There are lessons we can learn from history and recent experience, such as the response to Ebola in recent years and research on other global vaccine campaigns such as polio. Evidence from the social sciences and humanities is critical to our recovery and how we can shape a positive future.
Moreover, COVID-19 is not impacting individuals, communities, families, countries and other groupings in isolation. The experience of COVID-19 is taking place in differing and dynamic contexts; individuals and communities are living through their own social, moral and material situations. For example, pre-existing and long-standing structural inequalities and historical injustices seem to be playing an especially important role in the impacts of COVID-19, the dialogues around vaccination and the trustworthiness of those communicating in the current environment of uncertainty. There is good reason to believe that vaccine engagement is weaker amongst disadvantaged groups, and, crucially, that this is a logical consequence of structural disadvantage and discrimination.
[…]