We hear this phrase a lot: We’re all in this together. But will we still have a sense of community once the pandemic ends?
“Social solidarity speaks to our need to work together to get through this,” says Professor Maydianne Andrade, a Canada Research Chair in Integrative Behavioural Ecology and the University of Toronto Scarborough’s vice-dean of faculty affairs and equity.
“How much of the need to work together will forge in us new tendencies or expectations that will help us in the days to come?”
Episode three of The New Normal – a weekly podcast hosted by Andrade and created in collaboration with a University of Toronto Communications team led by producer Lisa Lightbourn – looks at how people are coming together during the pandemic.
Andrade speaks with sociologist and Associate Professor Erik Schneiderhan of U of T Mississauga about our need to connect and whether, as Schneiderhan says, “we'll be a little kinder, a little more open, a little more understanding” with each other when the crisis ends.