The three-year grant supports the creation of a unique oral history archive and course development focused on the history and ethics of public health pandemic response and faculty and doctoral student training that centers humanities knowledge and methods.

From left: Marian Moser Jones, Amy Fairchild and Cheryl Healton

The educational and research resource will create “new, urgently needed, accessible opportunities for the humanities to speak to public health and broaden access to humanities higher learning opportunities,” says , professor at the Maxwell School, who is principal investigator (PI). Co-PIs are , associate professor of health services management and policy at The Ohio State University, and , founding dean and professor of public health policy and management at the School of Global Public Health at New York University (NYU).

The research team has already conducted nearly 100 interviews with state and local health officials, delving into their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. A planned third phase of the oral history initiative will result in approximately 150 interviews from 40 states and two territories that will become part of a digital archive, “Stewards in the Storm,” housed at Syracuse University’s .

Widespread public and political backlash against protective health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic—and against those who were trying to implement those measures—has had a lasting impact on public health, including ongoing staff shortages and attempts to sharply curtail public health authorities needed to preserve life. In their initial rounds of interviews, the research team found that 36 percent of health officials reported receiving death threats, and 24 percent reported serious threats to their families—with women and people of color more likely to receive such threats.

The third round of interviews is important, Healton says, “because it ensures a resource with a broad, nationally inclusive sample that both researchers and instructors can use to conduct reliable, valid research and to develop strong humanities content in courses that reach both public health and humanities students.”

In addition to expanding the interviews, the researchers also plan to establish a hands-on “Backlash Lab” that will introduce students to the history and ethics of public health, oral history interviewing techniques, qualitative coding strategies and techniques, and quantitative analysis. The lab, anchored at Syracuse, Ohio State and NYU, will also create partnerships with colleges that have historically served Black, Hispanic or first-generation students. Students will code interviews and write case studies to be used in undergraduate and graduate courses as well as professional settings.

Additionally, a survey course, Pandemics: History, Ethics, Politics and Policy, will be developed collaboratively and offered at Syracuse, Ohio State, NYU and Cornell University, with the aim of extending it to other collaborating institutions and other schools and programs in public health. The course aims to cut across public health, public policy and the humanities with a focus on history, medical sociology and communications.

In years two and three of the project, the team will run two workshops for scholars teaching public health and humanities at community and four-year colleges and universities across the country, with a focus on institutions that have public health schools or programs. The workshops will introduce teachers to the techniques of oral history, suggest ways to work with the archive and extend the reach of the new course.

The project capitalizes on synergies between public health and the humanities and addresses common gaps in knowledge about public health history. “As important as easy access to primary documents related to pandemic responses are, we can further illuminate broader historical themes that enrich both the humanities and the field of public health by providing insight into peoples’ lived experiences of pandemics and pandemic response,” Moser Jones says.

“This rich body of narrative history does more than create qualitative data through oral history methods,” Fairchild adds. “Rather, it uses the experience of the pandemic as a lens that can clarify and contextualize the continuing climate of pandemic-associated backlash that has ongoing repercussions for pragmatic efforts to confront population health challenges, from reproductive rights to climate change. It is primarily the foundation for humanistic investigation into the ways in which governmental responses to crises are social products and reflect the societies in which people live and die.”

The (PJP) offers insight into people’s lives and experiences from May 2020 to 2022 in 55 countries through nearly 27,000 online journal entries of text, images, and audio.

The publication of the data is the result of a multi-year collaboration between the PJP team, led by anthropologists Associate Professor Sarah S. Willen of the University of Connecticut and Associate Professor Katherine A. Mason of Brown University, and the (QDR) at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.

The resulting collection is unique in its breadth and potential for use and re-use by researchers in anthropology, sociology, history and public health, among other fields.

“There are several large quantitative surveys in the social sciences that are broadly used,” says Sebastian Karcher, Associate Director of QDR. “But qualitative datasets that are large enough to be analyzed from so many different angles are very, very rare. The PJP data are going to be a treasure for social scientists for years to come, and we at QDR couldn’t be more excited to be the permanent home for them.”

To ensure that the data from the Pandemic Journaling Project would be accessible to future researchers, the team regularly consulted with QDR’s experts on questions ranging from file organization to ethics.

“We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to share these data widely and archive them for the future,” says Mason. “We were so lucky to be able to connect with Sebastian and the QDR team early in the process so that we could make sure that we were able to do so as ethically and effectively as possible.”

The PJP empowers people to chronicle their own experiences in order to create a record for the future. The resulting archive can help researchers understand how people lived — and reflected on their lives—during this time.

“Each journal, and each person’s story, matters on its own terms,” Willen says. “Taken together, this collection of materials offers an extraordinary real-time window onto how the pandemic challenged us and changed us, not just as individuals but also as members of broader communities.”

Already the data have been used to explore a wide variety of questions, ranging from the impact of the pandemic on different groups’ mental health, to students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe, to the human rights dimensions of the project itself, which the PJP team describes as a form of “archival activism.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology Michelle Parsons at Northern Arizona University, one of the earliest outside scholars to work with the data, said that the “PJP data—thousands of journal entries through time—are unique, offering a window into people’s changing experiences and emotions during a turbulent time. Also, it has been such a pleasure collaborating with the PJP team and with other scholars analyzing the data.”

To protect participants, access to the full PJP data on QDR requires prior approval—requests can be submitted directly from the once the website goes live on Feb. 15.

A significant subset of more than 2,000 entries also are publicly available for searching and browsing by anyone on the Featured Entries page of the PJP website: .