The U.S. pandemic narratives which embodied many conflicting structures failed to provide guidance for groups and individuals to construct a clear understanding of the pandemic or a consistent measure to combat the disease. This book provides a careful examination of the discordant narratives that embodied the chaos, tensions, and conflicts in the U.S. pandemic responses. The ultimate goal of this volume is to help groups and individuals understand just what went wrong in the U.S. pandemic responses.

Highlighting the significance of Maines’ works in symbolic interactionism, Volume 57 of Studies in Symbolic Interaction documents his most celebrated areas of scholarship, including social structure, narrative sociology, social interaction, dialectic perspective, temporality, and mesostructure.

Unheard Voices of the Pandemic reveals through first-person narratives what happened the year the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the United States. The seventeen stories included in this collection speak to the precarity, uncertainty, and injustice of that year, but also to bravery, solidarity, and generosity. Although the shadow cast by the COVID-19 pandemic is long, the insights gleaned through listening can last longer.

This book explores the phenomenon of distortion of information through media via the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which relevant information distortion and virality have occurred in regard to the disease and its risks. Positing that the interrelated processes of misinformation, disinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories are related forms of distortion of information through media (DIM) and can only be understood through a multilevel theoretical model that incorporates message-based, individual difference, social network-based, societal and geotechnical factors, Brian H. Spitzberg develops an integrative, well-argued, and well-evidenced framework within which these issues can and should be addressed. This book offers a model for further research across such disciplines as communication, journalism/media studies, political science, sociology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, public health, big data analytics, social network analytics, computational linguistics and geographic information sciences, and will interest researchers and students in those areas.

"Pandemics Publics and Narrative explores how members of the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It examines the stories related to us by individuals about what happened to them in 2009, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation and other infection control measures. The book charts also the story-telling of public life, including the 'be alert, not alarmed' messages from the beginning of the outbreak through to the 'the boy who cried wolf' problem that emerged later in the outbreak when the virus turned out to be less serious than first thought for most people. Key themes of the book are the significance of personal immunity for people as they reflected on how to respond the threat of an influenza virus and the ways in which universal public health advice was interpreted quite differently by people according to their medical and biographical situation. The book provides unprecedented insight into the lives of ordinary people during 2009, some affected profoundly and others hardly affected at all. By drawing on currents in sociocultural scholarship of narrative, illness narrative, and narrative medicine, it develops a novel 'public health narrative' approach that bridges health communications and narrative. The book provides therefore important new insights for health communicators and researchers across the social and health sciences"--

Michelle Fishburne did the unthinkable during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic: she motor-homed 12,000 miles all over the United States and sat down with hundreds of people face to face. People shared what their lives were like, what made them struggle, and what surprised them. The personal histories in this book show a diversity of American lives, from the young college student who finds unexpected fame on TikTok to a special-education teacher sharing the challenges of remote learning. Everyone's story is different. Some, like Fishburne, lost their jobs. Others lost family, friends, and even their own health and well-being. And yet among the difficulties, many found something that had eluded them before the pandemic. These testimonies offer a glimpse into what people across America lost and found during the pandemic's critical first year. Fishburne lets us hear people's stories as if we were there, in real time, at the beginning of COVID-19, when employment was uncertain, schools were online, and American life more unpredictable than ever before.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, a powerful and cathartic portrait of a country grappling with the Covid-19 pandemic—from feeling afraid and overwhelmed to extraordinary resilient—told through voices of people from all across America The Covid-19 pandemic was a world-shattering event, affecting everyone in the nation. From its first ominous stirrings, renowned journalist Eli Saslow began interviewing a cross-section of Americans to capture their experiences in real time: An exhausted and anguished EMT risking his life in New York City; a grocery store owner feeding his neighborhood for free in locked-down New Orleans; an overwhelmed coroner in Georgia; a Maryland restaurateur forced to close his family business after forty-six years; an Arizona teacher wrestling with her fears and her obligations to her students; rural citizens adamant that the entire pandemic is a hoax, and retail workers attacked for asking customers to wear masks; patients struggling to breathe and doctors desperately trying to save them. Through Saslow's masterful, empathetic interviewing, we are given a kaleidoscopic picture of a people dealing with the unimaginable. These deeply personal accounts constitute a crucial, heartbreaking record of the sweep of experiences during this troubled time, and show us America from its worst and to its resilient best.