CHAPTER 20

Archiving a Pandemic: The Pandemic Journaling Project as an Experiment in Anticipatory Archiving, Grassroots Collaborative Ethnography, and Archival Activism

Sarah S. Willen, Katherine A. Mason, and Heather M. Wurtz

I have been going through some social anxiety because i have become unfamiliar with socializing this days

I was a little sick this past week but i had to go to school because apparently Matric1 comes first

I couldnt go to one of my debate workshops because one of my peers got affected

It broke my heart but i had to accept it

I feel like this pandemic is slowly taking away the things i love.”

—B., age seventeen, South Africa, June 14, 2021

In the chaotic first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it felt like the world as we knew it had turned upside down, many researchers were quick to recognize the historic significance of the unfolding crisis. For some, including many contributors to this volume, the recognition that “history is happening now” triggered an impulse to document: to begin gathering and preserving evidence of the pandemic’s impact on ordinary people and their families and broader communities. In that vertiginous moment, as people around the world struggled to understand what was happening and how to protect themselves and those they loved, members of this odd fellowship of scholars found ourselves asking how our particular skills, tools, and commitments might prove useful in this time of crisis and uncertainty.

As medical anthropologists with a strong historical sensibility, we quickly realized that our own tools and skills had much to offer. Anthropologists are trained to analyze people’s everyday lives. We learn to listen, with attentiveness and care, to what is said out loud—and to notice things left unsaid. We strive to listen for voices that might otherwise be muted, silenced, or ignored, such as the voice of seventeen-year-old B. in South Africa, quoted above. B. manages, in a few short lines, to convey the impact of pandemic restrictions on her secondary school as well as the sense of loss, worry, and heightened mental distress that COVID-19 was generating in her life.

In response to that powerful impulse to document, and with these core anthropological skills and commitments in mind, two of us (Sarah and Katherine) moved quickly in the spring of 2020 to create the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), an online journaling platform and research study designed to offer people around the world a chance to chronicle their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time using only a smartphone or other electronic device.2 PJP launched in May 2020, just weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and ran as a weekly journaling platform until May 2022. In that two-year period, over 1,800 people from fifty-five countries participated, contributing a total of nearly twenty-seven thousand individual journal entries in the form of text, images, and/or audio recordings.

Our principal aim in creating PJP was to “pre-design an archive” of COVID-19 narratives and experiences,3 a goal we pursued with generous input from an interdisciplinary team of colleagues and students across the humanities, social sciences, and health sciences (including Heather, who joined the team in 2021).4 In crafting PJP, we looked to contemporary models of collaborative research5 and established modes of scholarly engagement with diaries and other first-person accounts,6 as well as earlier examples of what we describe as anticipatory archiving.

The labor of anticipatory archiving, as we conceptualize it, involves four elements: (1) recognizing that the “now” has historic significance, (2) developing and implementing a plan to systematically document current events, (3) thinking prospectively about how people at some future point might use the materials gathered, and (4) allowing that prospective thinking to shape the work of creating and collecting materials in the present. When we searched for models, the projects most closely aligned with our vision went beyond this broad definition of anticipatory archiving to meet a fifth criterion. Specifically, they predesigned an archive by creating an architecture, well in advance, for the archival product they hoped to produce. For PJP, this involved myriad small choices and decisions as we sought to make participation as easy as possible to recruit a critical mass of contributors, include a wide range of voices, and achieve comprehensive topical coverage.

The clearest example and strongest model we identified was the UK-based project Mass Observation (MO),7 created in 1937, that recruited “a national panel of volunteer writers who responded to the regular MO ‘directive’ or open-ended questionnaire on a variety of subjects including personal issues.”8 Although MO has undergone several major transformations since the 1930s, a version of the project continues to actively document everyday life in Britain through the present day.9 The materials collected, which are accessible to researchers and the broader public, have resulted in dozens of research publications over the decades. A second very different model is the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of documents clandestinely prepared by a diverse group of Jews who were imprisoned by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II.10 This comprehensive trove of materials gathered through this collective initiative included letters, diaries, newspapers, policy documents, and photographs as well as original monographs documenting the horrors participants were facing. These painstakingly collected materials were buried in metal boxes and milk jugs, only some of which could be located after the war. We draw inspiration from these earlier experiments in anticipatory archiving, the forward-looking vision of their architects, and their success in mobilizing people to find the time and energy to document the dynamics of their own lives, times, and struggles.

Like these earlier examples, PJP is rooted in a commitment to democratizing both the historical record and the process of knowledge production. Additional features of this work include a methodological orientation we describe as grassroots collaborative ethnography, whose goal involves “empowering people to see their own stories as worth telling, and sharing,”11 in addition to “emphasiz[ing] both broad public accessibility and the coproduction of knowledge with our interlocutors.”12 A third key feature is our commitment to archival activism, which we define as “a strategic commitment to facilitating equitable history-telling in the future through inclusive collection and preservation practices in the present.”13 The motto posted prominently on the PJP website encapsulates these core commitments: “Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.”

At the same time, PJP also represents an attempt to leverage scholarly skills and tools to create a community resource that might support processes of coping and healing. In a time of turbulence, confusion, and fear, PJP offered a confidential space for reflection and processing difficult experiences. It also created a quiet online space—a curated “Featured Entries” page14—where, with permission, we regularly posted a handful of anonymized contributions. Finally, while the project could make no promise of therapeutic benefit, we were aware of the strong evidence that, for some, journaling and other forms of creative expression and reflection can have mental health benefits.15

In this chapter we introduce PJP’s goals, mechanics, and initial outcomes, which include both conventional scholarly products (e.g., articles and books) and the fruits of our public scholarship and public-facing research collaborations (e.g., local community programs and a traveling international exhibition). We also discuss our decision to deposit PJP-1 contributions in a data repository where other researchers can use them in both the near term and long into the future.16 In closing, we briefly consider some of the lessons that historians, social scientists, and other experts in public health, mental health, disaster studies, and other fields might glean from these efforts. We intersperse our analytic reflections with brief observations from PJP participants to shed light on the range of voices captured by PJP and to signal the richness, nuance, and insight that real-time, first-person reflections can provide.

For this project, as for other chapters in this volume, the labor of constructing, operating, and beginning to analyze findings from PJP did indeed begin by “researching and writing from inside the disaster.”17 Although the design of the project emerged in COVID time, we expect that its value—analytical, methodological, and political—will have a much longer reach. In substantive and analytical terms, the PJP archive is a powerful resource for illuminating both the “nested” and “compound” aspects of the COVID disaster,18 as well as its profoundly asymmetrical consequences for different people, groups, communities, and regions. In methodological terms, the story of PJP’s design and creation highlights the value of an improvisational sensibility and a willingness to adapt and innovate upon existing systems and platforms in order to realize a practical vision. Finally, and as we elaborate elsewhere, collaborative modes of knowledge production have vital roles to play in documenting crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, preserving diverse perspectives, and articulating and advancing human rights–based visions of a better and more just and equitable future.19

Building a Pandemic Archive

This journal has been a way for me to process, to relate, to empathize with those who are similar and different from me. . . . It has been a joy to just write and create. . . . I learned to stand up for myself and know that it is okay to be overwhelmed, to be broken, to lean into my family and friends. . . . This journal has helped me find a way to connect with others without ever getting to meet them. . . . For that, I am truly grateful.

—Twenty-six-year-old biracial (Black and white) woman, US Northeast, January 19, 2021

During the two years that PJP ran as a weekly journaling platform, anyone with access to a smartphone or computer could participate, including teens ages fifteen to seventeen with permission of a parent or guardian. The PJP interface ran fully in both English and Spanish, and participants could submit their journal entries in any language they chose. Participants could create entries using writing, audio, and/or images, and no limitations were placed on the content they created. Of those who joined the project, over 90 percent used the English-language platform, and just under 10 percent used the Spanish platform.

With each entry, participants created a durable personal record of the pandemic that they could download securely at any time, while at the same time contributing their voice to the historical record. With each entry, they had the option of granting permission for their anonymized responses to be shared on PJP’s “Featured Entries” web page.

What Goes In an Archive?

The journal makes me think about what is happening. This includes more than the pandemic. Some of your questions make me think about the world in general and the US in particular. Some of your questions, especially about healthcare, seem redundant to me, being a Canadian. Americans and Canadians are similar in many ways. However, the issues that divide your nation seem foreign to me. Gun rights, abortion, and a fear of universal healthcare are three I have a difficult time understanding.

At times, I fear that America’s divisiveness is creeping across the border.

—Seventy-year-old man in Canada, May 5, 2022

One of the first key decisions we needed to make in designing PJP turned on a question that scholars in different fields answer differently: What is an archive, and what kind—and level—of detail ought it include? In an effort to thread the needle between the “maximum detail” approach that historians prefer and a “maximum confidentiality” approach employed in other social science disciplines, we decided to pair open-ended journaling prompts with a comprehensive baseline quantitative survey that gathered extensive nonidentifying information about individual journalers. The only personal information we requested was an email address or mobile phone number, which we used to distribute weekly invitations to contribute journal entries.

The baseline survey employed a combination of validated and original survey items on a wide range of topics including demographics (e.g., age, gender, income, country of residence, etc.), political leanings, media consumption patterns, insurance status, self-reported physical and mental health status, COVID-19 exposure, COVID-related precautions, and loneliness/social isolation.20 Several sets of questions, including biweekly physical and mental health questions, were then repeated periodically, yielding quantitative measures of change over time that can be analyzed in conjunction with participants’ qualitative entries.

After signing up and completing the baseline survey, participants were invited to create two journal entries in response to suggested narrative prompts.21 In each subsequent week, they received an invitation to contribute via their choice of email or text message. Each weekly link provided two opportunities to create qualitative journal entries. The first prompt was the same every week: “How is the coronavirus pandemic affecting your life right now?” For the second entry, we provided a choice of two prompts, typically including one focusing on subjective experience (e.g., “Think about the people closest to you. How has the pandemic affected them lately?”) and another with an external focus (e.g., “How has the pandemic affected your view of government and its role in your life?”).

Most journal entries were submitted as text, but participants could also create entries by uploading audio clips or images (Figure 20.1). We received three hundred audio files and nearly three thousand images along with well over twenty thousand written entries. Text entries ranged in length from a single sentence to many pages, with or without an accompanying audio or image file, and they ranged widely in tone, topic, and level of detail. PJP’s first phase (PJP-1) employed a cohort design such that all participants started with the comprehensive baseline survey, then received the same questions in the same order regardless of when they joined (i.e., Week #1 questions followed by Week #2, etc.).

Whose Voices Are Represented?

Seeing the behavior of people in my community has been the most disappointing aspect of this pandemic. . . . As an Asian American, I have feared being threatened or attacked in public. Living in an area with a history intertwined with white supremacy groups makes that threat even more plausible.

—Forty-two-year-old biracial (Asian American and white) woman in the US Northwest, May 13, 2021

We designed PJP to privilege access and ease of use, not to create a representative sample, which would have required a different methodological approach. We deliberately sought broad participation from people worldwide regardless of literacy level or access to a computer. Some limitations were inevitable. The need for access to some sort of digital device, access to Wi-Fi or cellular data, and basic competency in reading either English or Spanish admittedly excluded individuals without these resources. At the same time, we worked to maximize the capabilities of the technology available to us under pandemic circumstances. For instance, we aimed to make the platform clear and easy to use and to make sure people could participate in ten to fifteen minutes a week or less. We worked to ensure that all project communications were worded in straightforward language, that no computer would be needed (a smartphone or tablet afforded full participation), and, importantly, that people could participate fully without needing to write or type (through the submission of entries as audio or image files).

Drawing on the expertise of our key partners, we worked hard to introduce the opportunity to participate in PJP to individuals and communities who often are left out of the historical record. These recruitment efforts have deeply influenced the first round of PJP-based collaborations, research, and products, which feature the voices of first-generation community college students in New York City,22 secondary school students in South Africa,23 urban youths in central Mexico,24 Afro-Brazilian university students,25 and Black women in the United States who struggled to balance caregiving responsibilities with COVID risk in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.26

While some journalers participated just once, PJP garnered a substantial number of repeat journalers, including 695 who participated for four weeks or more, 307 who participated for ten weeks or more, 89 who participated for a year or more, and a steady group of 14 who stuck with the project for nearly the full two years. Rather than seeing attrition as a bug, we see it as a feature of this unique dataset. While longitudinal journals hold significant analytic value, even a brief contribution can prove both revelatory and deeply moving, as the excerpts included here make clear.

Journalers ranged in age from teens to elders in their nineties, although it bears mention that PJP was embraced by women and people in their teens and twenties with particular enthusiasm. Nearly 80 percent of journalers identified as female, and almost half were between fifteen and twenty-nine years old. While some identified as politically “conservative” or “moderate,” the large majority identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Participants ranged widely in many respects, including race/ethnicity, level of education, household income, and household composition, among other features (Table 20.1). The majority hailed from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, but smaller numbers participated from fifty-two other countries around the world (Figure 20.2). Of US-based journalers, nearly 40 percent identified as members of minoritized racial/ethnic groups. Twenty percent of all participants reported a household income under $50,000/year, and nearly 40 percent did not (yet) hold a bachelor’s degree. Overall, this large and diverse trove of material makes it possible to identify meaningful trends and patterns, some of which are already generating powerful insights about the impact of the pandemic on individual people, families, and communities around the world.

Predesigning an Archive—In Three Dimensions

The pandemic has attacked us right where we are most human; it has tried to rob us of our connectedness.

—Sixty-four-year-old Black woman, US Midwest, December 29, 2020

PJP was created as a space where people could share and preserve their stories as they would like them to be recorded and remembered. At the same time, we designed PJP as a flexible platform that would allow journalers to retain their own materials while simultaneously preserving them for posterity. In this respect, PJP has sought to offer people who might otherwise be overlooked or excluded from processes of history making the chance to shape both the pandemic narratives that emerge in the present and the historical accounts that will be composed, read, and explored in the future.

Our guiding commitment to predesigning an archive with equity and justice considerations in mind has scaffolded PJP in three different ways. First, individual journal entries all became part of a private personal archive that participants could create for themselves and their families. Participants could access and download their journals at any point via a secure online portal, thereby ensuring that their journal belonged to them as much as to the project. The fact that participants’ journals were always first and foremost their own proved especially important in both attracting people to join and encouraging ongoing participation over time.

We also gave participants control over when and how their journal entries would be shared. In the short term, this goal was achieved through a second archival dimension of PJP that remains active today: the Featured Entries page. This curated public web page effectively became a communal archive where people around the world could see their own voices as part of a larger chorus and their own stories as part of a larger conversation. The page offers participants, and now website visitors, a way to encounter others’ lives and learn about others’ experiences even without interacting directly. Unlike conventional social media platforms, the Featured Entries page provides a window into the pandemic experiences of anonymous others but did not offer any opportunity to “like” or comment on individual posts. Many journalers expressed appreciation for this chance to hear about other people’s pandemic experiences whether those experiences resonated with their own or were radically different. These opportunities to think comparatively has proven especially valuable to educators who have integrated aspects of PJP into their classroom teaching.27

PJP’s third mode of archiving, which reflects the project’s commitments to anticipatory archiving, archival activism, and the democratization of knowledge production, involves the creation of a durable research archive. Creating an archive that researchers could eventually access required considerable planning and forethought from the outset. Beginning in March 2020, we consulted with archivists, librarians, data security professionals, and web designers, in addition to our academic partners. Key decisions needed to be made around a wide array of issues, ranging from dissemination and recruitment of participants to collecting, managing, and organizing survey materials (including text-based journal entries, accompanying survey responses, and attached audio and image files), and issues of data protection and security.

After an intensive process of preparation, we deposited the PJP-1 dataset, with a collection of accompanying explanatory materials, in the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University.28 For twenty-five years (through 2048), researchers can apply for permission to access and analyze these materials.29 After 2048, all PJP-1 data will be publicly accessible via the Qualitative Data Repository without additional permissions or gatekeeping.

In the final week of PJP’s first phase, we asked participants about their motivations for participation. Responses ranged widely. Some were eager to preserve their memories for themselves or their loved ones, while others were explicit about their desire to contribute to the historical record. For many, personal, collective, and more formal historical motives were intertwined—an important insight that may hold value for other researchers interested in anticipatory archiving practices. All in all, many PJP journalers expressed appreciation for the opportunity to be part of the project. As one participant (a fifty-two-year-old white woman from northern California) put it, “Participating in [the] Pandemic journaling project study feels good, to know I can contribute somehow to future understanding of this crazy time.”

Archiving, Community Engagement, and Public Scholarship

Beyond the scholarly value of our grassroots collaborative approach, PJP has also generated a wide range of opportunities to bring our tools, methods, and insights into the world beyond the ivory tower. We have introduced secondary school students to PJP, run a series of children’s programs in collaboration with a large urban public library, and co-organized a virtual public forum with an equity-focused commission of Connecticut’s state legislature among other public-facing activities. We have also stretched the boundaries of scholarly spaces to include community voices by, for instance, inviting several PJP journalers to join as core participants in a virtual roundtable forum at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings.

Most recently, we collaborated with a curator and art historian30 and with a wide array of community partners, including public libraries, historical societies, museums, and academic institutions, to develop a traveling multimedia exhibition, Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project.31 In 2022–2025, we installed Picturing the Pandemic in seven cities located in four countries. Each of the first four iterations of the exhibition—in Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States; Heidelberg, Germany; and Mexico City, Mexico—was developed in partnership with local partners and thus was distinct from the others. We then developed a traveling version of the exhibition that appeared in three additional cities: Toronto, Canada; Storrs, Connecticut; and Syracuse, New York. In each location, the exhibition featured photographs, text, and audio contributions from PJP participants along with visual and audio materials contributed by local partners. Using QR codes, videos, and material objects along with contributed images, the exhibition has invited visitors to encounter COVID-19 stories and experiences different from their own. Visitors to the in-person exhibitions as well as the exhibition website have also been able to contribute their own pandemic images to the exhibition archive.32 Across these diverse locations, Picturing the Pandemic has further illuminated the radically uneven impact of the pandemic and created new opportunities for students, scholars, and community members of all ages to reflect and connect.

Conclusion

I hope the [history] books will quote from [PJP] to show the uncensored voices of people from around the world; their rage, sadness, frustration, grief, optimism, humor—all of it, so that future generations understand how we experienced it, uncensored, and unfiltered.

—Fifty-nine-year-old white woman on the US Eastern Seaboard, December 30, 2020

Whose pandemic stories are heard, and whose are not? Whose pandemic memories will be passed on to future generations or preserved in history books and whose will not? In the face of significant COVID-related limitations on geographic mobility and physical copresence, many researchers found ways to respond to the impulse that has animated PJP and other studies in this volume: the impulse to document and preserve pandemic struggles, fears, losses, and joys. In creating PJP, we found that virtual tools could stretch and bend in ways that transformed our understanding of what scholarship entails and our understanding of ourselves as researchers. Among our most valuable discoveries was the realization that these tools can help researchers cultivate a sense of ethnographic presence. They can also help create a kind of “holding space” in which people who will never know each other’s names or meet in person can nonetheless connect through shared experiences of confusion, uncertainty, and pain and as partners in the forward-looking act of making history.33 Through these opportunities for encounter—a half-punctuated snippet of thought, a late-night story recorded on a cellphone, or a photograph capturing a moment of fear, loss, or joy—innovative methods like these may even help craft new forms of commonality, connection, and care.

Notes

1. 1.  Preparation for South Africa’s Matriculation exam during the final year of high school.
2. 2.  The Pandemic Journaling Project, University of Connecticut and Brown University, https://pandemic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/.
3. 3.  Sarah S. Willen, Sebastian Wogenstein, and Katherine A. Mason, “Everyday Disruptions and Jewish Dilemmas: Preliminary Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” Jewish Social Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 192, https://doi.org/10.2979/jewisocistud.26.1.15.
4. 4.  We are especially grateful to political scientist Abigail Fisher Williamson, who played a crucial role in designing the quantitative aspects of the project.
5. 5.  Influences include recent work on “citizen science.” See Den Broeder et al., “Citizen Science for Public Health,” Health Promotion International 33, no. 3 (2018): 505–14, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daw086; Nadia Gaber, “Mobilizing Health Metrics for the Human Right to Water in Flint and Detroit, Michigan,” Health and Human Rights 21, no. 1 (2019): 179–89, https://www.hhrjournal.org/2019/06/mobilizing-health-metrics-for-the-human-right-to-water-in-flint-and-detroit-michigan/; and Bruno J. Strasser et al., “‘Citizen Science’? Rethinking Science and Public Participation,” in “Many Modes of Citizen Science,” ed. Dick Kasperowski and Christopher Kullenberg, special issue, Science & Technology Studies 32, no. 2 (2019): 52–76, https://doi.org/10.23987/sts.60425. For other forms of participatory and participatory action research, see Orlando Fals-Borda, “The Application of Participatory Action-Research in Latin America,” International Sociology 2, no. 4 (1987): 329–47, https://doi.org/10.1177/026858098700200401; Nina Wallerstein et al., eds., Community-based Participatory Research for Health: Advancing Social and Health Equity, 3rd ed. (Jossey-Bass of Wiley, 2017); and Danny Burns, Jo Howard, and Sonia M. Espina, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Participatory Research and Inquiry (Sage, 2021).
6. 6.  See, for example, Andy Alaszewski, Using Diaries for Social Research (Sage, 2006); James H. Sweet, “The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 10, no. 1 (2005): 259–61, https://doi.org/10.1525/jlca.2005.10.1.259; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (Vintage Books, 1991); and Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, 2015).
7. 7.  See “About Mass Observation,” Mass Observation, https://massobs.org.uk/about-mass-observation/, as well as individual Mass Observation publications such as Dorothy Sheridan, “Researching Ourselves? The Mass-Observation Project,” in Participating in the Knowledge Society, ed. Ruth Finnegan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Dorothy Sheridan, “Writing to the Archive: Mass-Observation as Autobiography,” Sociology 27, no. 1 (1993): 27–40, https://doi.org/10.1177/003803859302700104; and Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
8. 8.  Mass Observation Directives (1937–1955), The Keep, https://www.thekeep.info/collections/getrecord/GB181_SxMOA1_3.
9. 9.  See, e.g., Nick Clarke, ed., Everyday Life in the Covid-19 Pandemic: Mass Observation’s 12th May Diaries (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
10. 10.  See Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto (Vintage Books, 2009); and David G. Roskies, ed., Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto: Writing Our History (Yale University Press, 2019).
11. 11.  Sarah S. Willen, Kristina Baines, and Michael C. Ennis-McMillan, “Cultivating Voice and Solidarity in Times of Crisis: Ethnographic Online Journaling as a Pedagogical Tool,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 48 (2024): 45–65, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-023-09832-6.
12. 12.  Heather M. Wurtz, Sarah S. Willen, and Katherine A. Mason, “Introduction: Journaling and Mental Health During COVID-19; Insights from the Pandemic Journaling Project,” Social Science & Medicine—Mental Health 2 (2022): 100141, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100141.
13. 13.  Willen et al., “Cultivating Voice and Solidarity in Times of Crisis.” See also Megan A. Carney, “How Migrant Filmmakers Practice Archival Activism,” Sapiens, June 9, 2021, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/archival-activism/; and Corona Zhang, Adriana Sowell, and Sarah S. Willen, “How to Decolonize Future Histories of COVID-19, Starting Now,” The Thinking Republic, October 8, 2020, https://www.thethinkingrepublic.com/being-counted/how-to-decolonize-future-histories-of-covid-19-starting-now.
14. 14.  See “Featured Entries,” Pandemic Journaling Project, https://pandemic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/featured-entries/. In 2023, the cost of maintaining the original Featured Entries page, which was created on a commercial platform, became prohibitive. Rather than close the site down entirely, we recreated it as a durable university-hosted site.
15. 15.  James W. Pennebaker, “Writing About Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic Process,” Psychological Science 8, no. 3 (1997): 162–66, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x; James W. Pennebaker and Cindy K. Chung, “Expressive Writing, Emotional Upheavals, and Health,” in Oxford Handbook of Health Psychology, ed. Howard S. Friedman (Oxford University Press, 2011); Yeoun Soo Kim-Godwin, Suk-Su Kim, and Minji Gil, “Journaling for Self-Care and Coping in Mothers of Troubled Children in the Community,” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 34, no. 2 (2020): 50–57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnu.2020.02.005; and Allison Utley and Yvonne Garza, “The Therapeutic Use of Journaling with Adolescents,” Journal of Creativity in Mental Health 6, no. 1 (2011): 29–41, https://doi.org/10.1080/15401383.2011.557312.
16. 16.  Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason, Data for the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP-1), Phase One [Dataset], Qualitative Data Repository (QDR), Main Collective, V1, https://doi.org/10.5064/F6PXS9ZK.
17. 17.  See the Introduction in this volume.
18. 18.  See the Introduction in this volume.
19. 19.  Heather M. Wurtz, “Journaling as a Rights-Based Intervention During Pandemic Times: An Interview with the Creators of the Pandemic Journaling Project,” Journal of Human Rights 21, no. 4 (2022): 517–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2022.2091923.
20. 20.  The baseline survey instrument is accessible as an appendix to Wurtz et al., “Introduction: Journaling and Mental Health During COVID-19,” and as part of the full PJP-1 dataset at QDR. See Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason, “PJP_A-07_QuantitativeSurveyQuestions.xlsx,” Data for the Pandemic Journaling Project, Phase One (PJP-1), 2024, QDR Main Collection, V1, https://doi.org/10.5064/F6PXS9ZK/0WRWKO.
21. 21.  The full list of narrative prompts is accessible as part of the PJP-1 dataset. See Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason, “PJP_A-06_QualitativeNarrativePrompts.xlsx,” Data for the Pandemic Journaling Project, Phase One (PJP-1), 2024, QDR Main Collection, V1, https://doi.org/10.5064/F6PXS9ZK/GHVD5K.
22. 22.  Kristina Baines, “‘It’s Normal to Admit You’re Not Okay’: New York City College Students Shaping Mental Health Through Journaling,” Social Science & Medicine—Mental Health 2 (2022): 100119, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100119.
23. 23.  Lorato Trok and Nancy J. Jacobs, “Reaching Out from Lockdown: A Writing Group for Young Black South Africans,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 48, no. 1 (2024): 113–22.
24. 24.  “Escucha Podcast Project,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMLxYP__K6_N8IyvaXp4Gbg.
25. 25.  Renan Vicente da Silva, Carlos Eduardo Assunção Alves, Mayana Ribeiro Montenario, and Laura Rebecca Murray, “Writing to Create, Mend, and Rebel: Three Reflections on Journaling as Escrevivência for Afro-Brazilian Public University Students during COVID-19,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 48, no. 1 (2024): 123–32.
26. 26.  Jolaade Kalinowski et al., “Shouldering the Load Yet Again: Black Women’s Experiences of Stress During COVID-19,” Social Science & Medicine—Mental Health 2 (2022): 100140, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2022.100140.
27. 27.  See Willen et al., “Cultivating Voice and Solidarity in Times of Crisis.”
28. 28.  See Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason, “Data for the Pandemic Journaling Project, Phase One (PJP-1),” 2024, QDR Main Collection, V1, https://doi.org/10.5064/F6PXS9ZK.
29. 29.  See Sarah S. Willen and Katherine A. Mason, “PJP_A-03_TermsOfAccess.pdf,” Data for the Pandemic Journaling Project, Phase One (PJP-1), 2024, QDR Main Collection, V1, https://doi.org/10.5064/F6PXS9ZK/7UYI4F.
30. 30.  Curator and art historian Alexis Boylan has been a key partner and collaborator on the exhibition.
31. 31.  Picturing the Pandemic: Images from the Pandemic Journaling Project (website), https://pandemic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/ptp-exhibition-home/.
32. 32.  A selection of visitor contributions can be found at “What’s Your Story?,” The Pandemic Journaling Project, https://pandemic-journaling-project.chip.uconn.edu/ptp-whats-your-story/.
33. 33.  Jaswant Guzder and Cécile Rousseau, “A Diversity of Voices: The McGill ‘Working with Culture’ Seminars,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 37, no. 2 (2013): 347–64, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9316-0; Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Embracing Uncertainty as a Path to Competence: Cultural Safety, Empathy, and Alterity in Clinical Training,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 37, no. 2 (2013): 365–72, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-013-9314-2; and Donald W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48, no. 3 (1967): 368–72.