Western Sydney’s growth-driven boom had ended before COVID-19 hit. Some neighbourhood unemployment rates were 2-3 times the metropolitan average, with female workforce participation as low as 43%.
Pandemic histories are useful for understanding COVID-19, but how they connect with race, public health, revolution, labour and colonialism are needed to explain the present and predict the future.
In this week’s round-up of coronavirus articles by scholars around the globe, we explore the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 and the latest on drug trials.
Dickens’s novels highlighted the poverty of education for the working classes. The all-important Education Act was finally passed in the year of his death.
High-density city living has been touted as a way to solve the problem of creating more sustainable, more liveable cities. But instead cities are only more liveable for a few.
When South Africa eventually emerges from the fog of the COVID-19 crisis, structural reform, including land reform, will be high on the political agenda as never before.
Michael Fletcher, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
With unemployment soaring due to COVID-19, why is Jacinda Ardern’s centre-left government significantly less generous towards beneficiaries than Scott Morrison’s centre-right government in Australia?
With half the global workforce facing job loss, massive stimulus packages are needed to revive emerging economies and reduce mass unemployment, poverty and starvation.