During Dr. Erin Moore's Fall 2020 course Anthropology, Public Health, and Human Rights, students conducted a collaborative, digital ethnography of the pandemic. At a time when the entire discipline of anthropology has been required to reimagine the “field” of ethnographic fieldwork, these projects developed innovative methodologies to compile data about the pandemic at a distance—primarily virtually. Taken together, these projects not only demonstrate how we might rethink what counts as ethnographic data, but they also show different and promising modes for investigating the racial and socioeconomic disparities of health the pandemic laid bare. Taken separately, the COVID Ethnographies tell important stories of how the pandemic has affected college students’ mental health and economic well-being; food banks and distribution networks; domestic violence reporting and response; the rise and spread of virus conspiracy theories; the role of the National Guard in providing public health; and how Columbus’s Black communities have experienced lack of access to COVID-19 testing sites in historically redlined districts.

Check out the full project.