Creating Comics to Address Well-Being and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

In this descriptive case series, we detail the theoretical basis, methodology, and impact of a small-scale pilot implementation of graphic medicine workshops as an innovative approach to well-being and resilience in the age of COVID-19 and increasing awareness of racial injustice. The data provided in this article are anecdotal and based on participation in the workshops. Images created during the workshops are also shared as examples of the types of reflection that graphic medicine can enable. The workshops themselves were designed collaboratively and are based on the theoretical principles of graphic medicine, narrative medicine, and racial and social justice. They were conducted as part of a larger wellness initiative and were offered to health care-focused faculty at our academic medical institution. Our findings suggest that this was a beneficial activity which helped participants to reflect and reconsider their experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic and surging awareness of racial injustice. Reflections also showed that drawings were correlated with ProQOL scores and may, in larger numbers, also help to mitigate or bring attention to issues of burnout in frontline providers. Drawings shared show the tremendous impact of COVID-19 and the simultaneous chaos and emptiness of practicing during dual pandemics. Our workshops engaged about 20 frontline health care providers and other health care faculty and highlight the utility of graphic medicine as a tool for building resilience and encouraging self-reflection. Further study is necessary, as is more rigorous analysis of the relationship between the graphics created and the ability to recognize and mitigate burnout.

Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

Open for All: How Are Federal and Municipal Land Management Agencies Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic Alongside Increased Societal Recognition of Racial Injustice

In addition to impacts on human health and the economy, COVID-19 is changing the way humans interact with open space. Across urban to rural settings, public lands–including forests and parks – experienced increases and shifts in recreational use. At the same time, certain public lands have become protest spaces as part of the public uprisings around racial injustice throughout the country. Land managers are adapting in real-time to compound disturbances. In this study, we explore the role of the public land manager during this time across municipal and federal lands and an urban-rural gradient. We ask: How adaptable are public land managers and agencies in their recreation management, collaborative partnerships, and public engagement to social disturbances such as COVID-19 and the co-occurring crisis of systemic racial injustice brought to light by the BLM uprisings and protests? This paper applies qualitative data drawn from a sample of land managers across the northeastern United States. We explore management in terms of partnership arrangements, recreational and educational programs, and stakeholder engagement practices and refine an existing model of organizational resilience. The study finds abiding: reports of increased public lands usership; calls for investment in maintenance; and need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in both organizational settings and landscapes themselves; and the need for workforce capacity. We discover effective ways to respond to compound disturbances that include open and reflective communication, transforming organizational cultures, and transboundary partnerships that are valued as critical assets.

2020

Chapter 7 provides a look into CWG prior to and after the 2020 election, as well as interviews with several group members prior to the election results. Through this data, this chapter explores how CWG and its members grappled with a global pandemic, a national reckoning around racial injustice, and the gear-up to an unprecedented presidential election. The women of CWG had closed out 2019 with optimism. In looking to their efforts for the 2020 election, the women promised to make “voter education” a priority—continuing their outreach and exploring new ways of reaching possible Democrats in the area. This chapter considers how 2020 reflects the same realities as the years before it and how it presents new challenges regarding if and how people express their political beliefs.

Social, Racial, and Economic Justice

This chapter assesses social, racial, and economic injustice. The marginalization of communities of color in the United States is of unique concern, particularly the marginalization of Black Americans. While it is true that many communities of color have suffered from deep-seated structural injustice, it is Black Americans who have, since before the country's founding, been the group most vulnerable to racial injustice. The emergence of some excellent scholarship in the past few years that has highlighted the place of anti-Blackness specifically as a detrimental force that influences health cannot, and should not, be swept up into broader generalizations around the pernicious influence of racial injustice overall. COVID-19 revealed how the institution of slavery has, over hundreds of years, continued to shape racial injustice and consequent poor health for Black Americans. Before changes to this status quo can be achieved, movements must change public opinion around issues of injustice. Once we understand injustice, we have a responsibility to not look away, to fix the racial, social, and economic inequities which generate poor health. But the path to justice does not end with changes in public attitudes and the passage of civil rights legislation. Achieving this goal takes pursuing not just social, but economic justice.

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>