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The project was created by UConn faculty and students from various disciplines<\/a> with two goals in mind. First, it provides a public platform where individuals can chronicle the impact of the pandemic in their lives and learn about others\u2019 experiences. It will also help researchers study the effects of COVID-19 on different groups and communities.<\/p>\n \u201cWe asked our team: If you were a historian and could pre-design your archive, what would you want to find in it?\u201d says Willen.<\/p>\n The idea for the project began with an email from Richard Brown, a historian and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UConn.<\/p>\n \u201cMy colleagues at the Human Rights Institute have been connecting by email to share our thoughts and concerns,\u201d says Willen. \u201cBrown sent a note to the group in mid-March and said something that really moved me. He wrote: \u2018We are not often consciously thrust into HISTORY.\u00a0Now we are.\u00a0It is an opportunity to learn about ourselves, and our society.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI had been thinking about the role of archives, and researchers, and universities in tumultuous times,\u201d says Willen. \u201cThese words prompted me to ask: How could we provide people with tools to process and record their experience of the pandemic in their own way?\u201d<\/p>\n Brown, who is now retired, continues to serve as a Gladstein Committee<\/a> member for the Human Rights Institute.<\/p>\n On the project\u2019s public website, weekly survey questions and journaling prompts are sent to users, and address topics such as work and finances, living circumstances, mental health, and encounters with discrimination and racism, as well as experiences of social connection, community, and the arts.<\/p>\n \u201cPsychologists have found that short writing exercises can have a positive impact on mental health, especially under challenging circumstances,\u201d Willen explains.<\/p>\n The project is open to anyone 18 or older, and the team hopes that members of communities hit hardest by the pandemic will choose to participate. Survey responses and journal entries will be collected in a digital data repository where researchers can begin to study them right away.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re asking some demographic questions up front, which will help us learn how different groups are experiencing this time\u2014for instance, different racial\/ethnic communities, religious communities, or professional groups, like essential workers,\u201d Willen says. She and Mason expect the current unrest will sharpen existing divides.<\/p>\n Participation is anonymous, and after an initial demographic questionnaire, participants are asked two questions to prompt their journal entries. For the duration of the pandemic, participants will receive an email or text message each week with a link to a few short survey items and new set of journaling questions.<\/p>\n Participants create their journal entries by writing, recording and uploading their voice, or submitting photos with text or audio. Each time they upload a journal entry, they can choose whether it is public or private. Each week, a sampling of public entries will be shared so participants can learn about others\u2019 experiences. Participating will take as little as 15 minutes a week, Willen estimates.<\/p>\n The Pandemic Journaling Project was launched with seed funding from UConn units and external funders<\/a> including the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Global Affairs, the Human Rights Institute, and a Rapid Response Grant from the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy.<\/p>\n When classes moved online in March 2020, Willen redesigned her special topics course on \u201cAnthropology and the Writer\u2019s Craft\u201d as a lab space and incubator for the project. Questions and narrative prompts for the weekly journal entries are being developed in consultation with faculty as well as students on the project\u2019s Advisory Board.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is clear,\u201d says Willen. \u201cUsually, history is written only by the powerful.\u00a0When the history of these difficult times is written,\u00a0we want to make sure everyone has a chance to be heard.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sarah S. Willen<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, PhD, MPH<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. She\u00a0is author or editor\/co-editor of four books and<\/em>\u00a0over 35 articles and book chapters, including pieces in the\u00a0Lancet<\/a>,\u00a0Health and Human Rights Journal<\/a>,\u00a0Medical Anthropology Quarterly,<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Social Science and Medicine<\/a>,\u00a0as well as\u00a0<\/em>Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel\u2019s Margins<\/a>\u00a0(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hays, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.\u00a0Dr. Willen is Principal Investigator\u00a0<\/em>of\u00a0<\/em>ARCHES | the AmeRicans\u2019 Conceptions of Health Equity Study<\/a><\/em>, and\u00a0<\/em>Co-Founder of the\u00a0Pandemic Journaling Project<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Katherine A. Mason, PhD<\/strong><\/a><\/em>, a medical anthropologist, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University and Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project. Her first book,\u00a0Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic\u00a0<\/a>(Stanford, 2016),\u00a0draws on fieldwork in southeastern China to explore the professionalization and the ethics of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic. Dr. Mason is currently developing a multi-sited ethnographic study of perinatal mood disorders in the U.S. and China. Her research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, U.S. Fulbright program, and Association for Asian Studies.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Associate Professor of Anthropology Sarah Willen is leading an interdisciplinary collaboration to record the voices and everyday experiences of individuals living through the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":161496,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2213,88,2312,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2214],"class_list":["post-161491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-coronavirus","category-global-affairs","category-hri","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 07:25:23","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161491"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161546,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161491\/revisions\/161546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/161496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161491"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=161491"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=161491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/thumbnail_Pandemic-Journaling-Project-logo-300x97.png\"){kind=logo}
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