Abstract
To say that COVID-19 and the accompanying March 2020 (and beyond) global shutdowns altered social life would be an understatement. Millions of people around the world died, and the routines of everyday life were shattered. Marginalized communities, particularly prior to the vaccine, were the most affected by this deadly disease, and its reverberations continue to shape many people's lives, including my own.
Persevering during the Pandemic: Stories of Resilience, Creativity, and Connection shifts attention from COVID-19’s worldwide wreckage to narratives of resilience. In doing so, this edited volume asks a fundamental question: How did people survive the pandemic? Editors Deborah Macey, Michelle Napierski-Prancl, and David Staton pull together authors from across fields and professions to answer this question. Despite different theoretical orientations, data, and methods, what binds the volume together is the centrality of storytelling in each chapter. This centrality of storytelling is important because, as the editors note in their introduction, “stories shape who we are. Stories offer organization amid dissonance, giving light in the darkness” (p. 2).
What follows the introduction are chapters documenting the early days of the pandemic and the March 2020 shutdowns. Throughout the volume, authors reveal the wide range of strategies, coping mechanisms, and cultural touchstones people used and adapted in response to COVID-19. Substantively, these discuss academics’ pedagogical shifts to meet the demands of emergency remote instruction (Chapters 2, 9, and 10); how television served as a balm and means of connection (Chapters 11, 15, and 16); capturing the chaos COVID-19 created for fishing industries (Chapter 4); analyses of public figures’ responses (or lack thereof) to the pandemic (Chapters 5 and 6; the former asks why Dr. Birx, coordinator of the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, remained silent as President Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to combat the disease, while the latter documents how Cuomo was exalted for his response to the pandemic and subsequently resigned because of documented sexual harassment against eleven women); adaptations and responses to the pandemic's effects on the arts (Chapters 7 and 8); and how to create connections with others via neighborhood walking (Chapter 12), food (Chapter 14), photos and social media (Chapter 3), and parents’ creative acts for seniors in the class of 2020 who were not able to attend a traditional in-person graduation (Chapter 13).
The volume's collection of personal narratives and autoethnographic accounts of the early days of the pandemic are rich and will serve as useful resources for future scholars and lay people, providing suggestions for how to cope with future disasters (including the ever-encroaching effects of climate change) and revealing a glimpse into everyday life in the pandemic, with an emphasis on hope and community. As a sociologist, this volume also served as an insight into communications research—the conversations being had, the theories used, and how data and methods are thought about.
I’d be remiss, however, if I failed to note the whiteness of the volume, the lack of attention to gendered racism, and the resistance and responses of communities of color who make up the global majority. Although some of the authors make note of racialization of experiences, the vast majority of chapters are colorblind. They reflect the privilege of whiteness as unmarked and distant from much of the horror of COVID-19. They offer stories of individual (white, middle-class) solutions and resilience to systemic problems—problems that COVID-19 deepened and that demand solutions to address systemic inequities that are racialized, gendered, classed, and transnational. Without attention to these processes and communities, any work on COVID-19—whether on its disastrous impacts or on the resilience, resistance, and hope of people and communities—is incomplete.