Abstract
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to reshape all aspects of everyday life. Its devastation extends beyond the private sphere into political, economic, and cultural contexts. As such, people attempt to make sense of and bring meaning to both moments of crisis and the mundane through media production, consumption, and content creation in our digital world. This impact has been far from equal, with disparities across race, gender, age, and social class. And yet, much of the attention has been to those whose voices have historically been front and center, With this special issue, we highlight just a few of the communities that have been otherwise overlooked in capturing the stories of the pandemic.
Early in the global crisis, ad campaigns, news stories, and on social media perpetuated the mantra “We’re all in this together,” falsely homogenizing this experience, ignoring the vast disparities stemming from positions of privilege. No one can overlook the difficulty of working in health care throughout the pandemic, for those who risked their lives to care for COVID patients. At least temporarily, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and others visible on the front line received accolades for their work, as they battled with disease themselves. Left out of the public praise were the numerous employees deemed essential in sanitation, food production, transportation, and other occupations similarly risking their lives, many of whom succumbed to the disease. These overlooked people that kept society running were disproportionately Black and Brown – dying from COVID at much higher rates than their white counterparts (Rogers et al., 2020).
Occupation and socioeconomic class created a privileged wedge for the pandemic experience. For at least some non-health care workers with stable employment that could be done remotely, the lockdown served as a disruptive inconvenience, especially in households with children. Even within this group, not all was equal. Mothers bore the brunt of the unpaid labor. With childcare stripped away, many women (and a few men) juggled work Zoom calls with supervising distance learning (Petts et al., 2021). Rural communities struggled with adequate WiFi, while urban families lacked convenient green space to exercise and spread out. Many individuals and families faced eviction and food scarcity with an estimated 114 million people unemployed globally (Richter, 2021). And, given the politicization of the pandemic, region and community shaped everyday life throughout the last two years, determining protocols for schools, businesses, activities, health care, and other important aspects.
Across these factors, intersectional positions further differentiated health and overall life. Even before the World Health Organization's declaration of the pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Trump administration wrongfully blamed China as the source and instigator of diseases. Propagated through news and social media, such accusations fueled discrimination and hate toward Asian Americans (Tessler et al., 2020). On a related note, wrongful accusations that immigrants imported COVID similarly underscored existing racist attitudes, contributing to the marginalization (Louie & Viladrich, 2021). And, of course, one can't ignore the link between pandemic discrimination and the protests for justice against police brutality. The murder of George Floyd and subsequent worldwide demonstrations exhibited the need for significant overhauls to combat institutional racism in law enforcement, public health, and other systems (Toure et al., 2021).
Overall, American media coverage of COVID has been almost exclusively focused on U.S. issues. This emphasis has ignored experiences of the pandemic in other cultures and countries, such as the methanol poisoning outbreak in Iran or the impact of lockdowns on urban refugees in Uganda (Aghababaeian et al., 2020; Bukuluki et al., 2020). Global inequalities have existed, as countries have varied in their COVID responses. The pandemic magnified the digital divide. According to a UNICEF report, more than 463 million students worldwide lacked the technology and/or remote education to adequately learn remotely in 2020 (United Nations Children’s Fund, 2020). Vaccination distribution has also been far from fair. As anti-vaxxers protested in the U.S. and in major European cities, supply shortages have left people in Afghanistan and many African countries unprotected (“Task Force on COVID-19 Vaccines,” 2021). Treatments and testing supplies have also been difficult to access in some low-income areas. In other words, unearned privilege has disproportionately determined the risk of disease, quality of care, and health outcome across different regions of the world.
From the initial months of the pandemic in Spring 2020, researchers across disciplines began studying its impact. Journalism and mass communication studies have illuminated the diffusion of coronavirus in news and social media in the early months (Chen et al., 2020; Gozzi et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Qin et al., 2020). Much attention has also been given to the creation, distribution, and reception of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories throughout the pandemic, negatively influencing vaccination uptake and other mitigation strategies (i.e. Enders et al., 2021; Loomba et al., 2021; Shahi et al., 2021; Yang et al., 2021). Studies have also documented the perspectives of parents, students, health care workers, and other groups (Aucejo et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2020; Verlenden et al., 2021; Xiong & Peng, 2020). Researchers have also begun exploring the beliefs, perceptions, and experiences of marginalized, underserved, rural communities across cultures (Alonzo & Popescu, 2021; Bloom et al., 2021; De Fuentes-Vicente et al., 2021). Recent scholarship examines COVID information access and navigation for Black women, Korean immigrant women, d/Deaf ASL-users, and other groups, investigates Black and Latinx interpretations of community-targeted COVID health messaging, and assesses pandemic discourse for various western and non-western populations (Ahinkorah et al., 2020; Alsan et al., 2021; Chandler et al., 2021; Jang & Jung, 2021; Khan et al., 2020; Rai et al., 2021; Panko et al., 2021). Still, more research is needed to capture and delve into the impact and experiences of marginalized individuals and communities.
Unfortunately, there has been precedent for overlooking the voices of the underrepresented. In the U.S., the preserved history of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics is primarily white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-men in power (Foss, 2020). Because this group had access and often produced the media content of the moment, their views were typically considered important and thus, worth recording and saving for future generations. Most of the stories from women, people of color, immigrants, the economically-disadvantaged, disabled, and those that intersectionally crossed these groups were left out or lost, despite the importance of their experiences. We will never know how the Black street cleaners felt during the 1721 Boston smallpox epidemic or of the Alaskan indigenous tribes’ mourning rituals after influenza decimated half of their population.
The loss of these diverse voices makes it that much more important to preserve inclusive narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like crises of the past, inequality has prevailed, with cases and death rates higher among specific segments of the global population. And, similar to the past, scholarship and popular media have utilized a white patriarchal, western lens, ignoring the needs and voices of othered groups. The foundational elements of our field: power, identity and representation, are being challenged during and, in many ways, are destabilized by, our pandemic moment. At the same time, grassroots movements and emerging technologies offer counterhegemonic messages, drawing newly-surfaced attention to rug-swept problems. In this special issue of JCI, we aim to uncover and highlight some of the ways that lesser known or underrepresented groups have made sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, as channeled through news and social media platforms.
Emerging out of the COVID 19 pandemic offers us a host of affordances. Indeed, the opportunities to gaze upon the past, present and future are themselves bonafide indicators of why we need critical/cultural scholarship in 2022 and beyond. Fact based, historically grounded and theoretically infused storytelling allows us to make sense of and bring meaning to the nuances of where we have been, where we are, and where we might be headed. Our statement of purpose in this special issue could be said to be the process of shining light on what might be missing, whose voices might be lost, or what stories have yet to be adequately told. We, therefore, hope that this special issue can represent a forum through which to preserve different voices. Focused outside of the mainstream, we conceptualize the power of the other as worthy of sustained consideration. Our theoretical framework is infused with the ideas of those who have come before us in these efforts, including Norman K. Denzin (1989), Laurel Richardson (1994) and Stuart Hall (1974), among other scholars. We aim to be looking where others might not, so that we can see that which might otherwise remain unseen.
Braiding collective memory into media and memory, we recognize memory as more communitarian in our age of social media sharing (Gloviczki, 2015; Hermida, 2016). Ways of knowing the past have become (1) decidedly iterative and ongoing, (2) often in dialog through technological platforms and practices and (3) fundamentally fluid rather than fixed. Memory is a participatory collage-making more than ever before, with social interaction(s) fleshing out what might well have been lost, during an earlier technological era, to the fallibility of human recordkeeping or individual memory. Indeed, details can today be recorded, stored, searched and, thus, preserved online. Our hope in this special issue is that the details offered in this research allow for a richer narrative of both our pandemic moment and the hopefully-soon-to-come post-pandemic moment to be entered into the scholarly record.
The intersection of COVID-19 and critical media studies brings forward core concerns about power, identity and representation. While each paper considers all three of those core concerns, Matsilele and colleagues’ study of the case of African newsrooms’ pandemic response as well as Kananovich's study of the case of social media discourse on coronavirus in Belarus are especially notable for their investigations of power. Carter Olson and colleagues’ "The Mothers are Medicine" study adds valuable knowledge to the arenas of identity and representation.
The research in this special issue looks to extend understanding about COVID-19 and critical media studies, especially in understudied contexts. The articles collected herein shed needed light on collective memory/ies of the pandemic and its aftermath. We are grateful to the authors of these studies for being willing to look where others might not have looked, to make sense of the particulars of what will likely be a generation-defining public health crisis. Indeed, critical media studies provide a lens through which to make sense of the pandemic and its impacts on cultures that are often outside of mainstream coverage. The past 18–24 months have taught us all, students and scholars alike, about how “we have become dependent on the media for the conduct of everyday life” (Silverstone, 2007, p. 5). Amidst the pandemic and its aftermath, we must remember how the study of media and memory allows interdisciplinary media scholars to “appreciate the complicated, multifaceted work of remembering” (Gloviczki, 2021, p. 8). The research in this special issue positions both emerging and seasoned scholars to more easily make significant strides in that direction. We remember in order to document the past, more fully live in the present and plan for the future.
Humans continue to experience life in extraordinarily local ways. Communication scholar Dr. Pablo Boczkowski has rightly noted “personal screens have become the dominant devices through which we access information” (2021, p. 1). In fact, many of us experienced the pandemic through deeply felt individual boundaries: we did what we had to; for ourselves, for our families, for our dear ones. The memories, realities and losses of our time were, are and will continue to be made real on the devices in our pockets and in the palm of our hand. It was more difficult than ever to distance ourselves from the pandemic, unfolding as it was on devices that have become integral to our waking lives. The resulting impact has a profound and enduring depth to it. These research articles not only remind us that we cannot simply look away. More importantly, they remind us of the importance of looking closer. As we engage in that level of fuller exploration, may we come to recognize the contours of our discipline. We hope the insights revealed in this special issue demonstrate lessons that might otherwise be squelched out of mainstream conversations. May we allow ourselves, students and scholars, to proceed slowly through the various stages of what will come after the pandemic. Enduring the collective pain that we have lived through is neither easy nor simple. Facing death and long-term disability, facing history and ourselves, we need to recognize how much we need each other going forward. The future will become a collective engagement. The research contained in this special issue represents one important step in that direction.
Philosopher and critical theorist Jacques Derrida wrote, in “By Force of Mourning,”: “One cannot hold a discourse on the ‘work of mourning’ without taking part in it,” (2013, p. 327, emphasis in original). With this special issue, we as its editors humbly join the authors in recognizing the enormity of the pandemic on media and cultural studies. We feel fortunate to be able to participate in this vital conversation and we look forward to the dialogs that we hope will emerge in the years and decades ahead.
Organizing a special issue like this one is a certain sort of turn away from certainty. We choose here to lean instead toward doubt. Recognizing that complete understandings of evolving events like the COVID-19 public health pandemic are not possible, we nonetheless hope that the research collected here reveals questions that might not otherwise be open for or worthy of sustained consideration. We elevate the other in the spirit of making space for doubt and looking more closely at what we think we know for sure.
We extend our gratitude to Dr. Thomas Oates, Tessa Adams, and the Journal of Communication Inquiry staff for providing the opportunity and space to begin to address these vital perspectives. Thank you as well to our contributors. In “#presidentspartingwords at a Critical Juncture: Reclaiming the Autonomous Subject in Social Media Discourse on Coronavirus in Belarus,” Volha Kananovich explores the audience reception of social media posts about Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko's comments about COVID victims. In this way, Kananovich's work explores the increasingly participatory media landscape, where audiences today have both the means and the desire to make themselves heard. Then in “Reconstruction and adaptation in times of a contagious crisis: A case of African newsrooms’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic,” Trust Matsilele, Lungile Tshuma and Mbongeni Msimanga shift the focus to media outlets in Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, using semi-structured interviews to capture the experiences of journalists during the pandemic. Matsilele and colleagues’ important study sheds needed light on the journalistic point of view, foregrounding the lived realities of the profession during precarious times. Finally, Candi S. Carter Olson, Benjamin LaPoe, Victoria LaPoe, Cristina L. Azocar, and Bharbi Hazarika study the impact of COVID on U.S. indigenous communities in “‘Mothers are Medicine’: U.S. Indigenous Media Emphasizing Indigenous Women's Roles in COVID-19 Coverage.” Carter Olson and colleagues mine the particulars of indigenous media in order to better understand a too often understudied element of our communication world. Each of these articles offer unique, critical and cultural scholarship on groups that have been overshadowed or left out of mainstream attention. Here, we hope to normalize a broader, more nuanced conceptualization of the ongoing pandemic and its aftermath. Moving forward, it is imperative that we continue to address the inequities and disparities of the pandemic – not just in COVID's direct effects, but in the media coverage and treatment of these groups.