Berea College, founded in 1855 on the principles of socio-educational equality, is an institution devoted to giving voices to the oppressed. This book, Critical Storytelling during the COVID-19 Pandemic, is a tribute to giving students from a variety of backgrounds a voice for the displacement they felt during the raging spikes of the early pandemic period. Each student offers their take on the pandemic itself, how it affected their education, as well as how it displaced them. From stories of exile to those of triumph, this work is a heralding account of dozens of students’ experiences.

New York Times Bestseller For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the president insisted there was nothing to worry about. Fortunately, we are still a nation of skeptics. Fortunately, there are those among us who study pandemics and are willing to look unflinchingly at worst-case scenarios. Michael Lewis’s taut and brilliant nonfiction thriller pits a band of medical visionaries against the wall of ignorance that was the official response of the Trump administration to the outbreak of COVID-19. The characters you will meet in these pages are as fascinating as they are unexpected. A thirteen-year-old girl’s science project on transmission of an airborne pathogen develops into a very grown-up model of disease control. A local public-health officer uses her worm’s-eye view to see what the CDC misses, and reveals great truths about American society. A secret team of dissenting doctors, nicknamed the Wolverines, has everything necessary to fight the pandemic: brilliant backgrounds, world-class labs, prior experience with the pandemic scares of bird flu and swine flu…everything, that is, except official permission to implement their work. Michael Lewis is not shy about calling these people heroes for their refusal to follow directives that they know to be based on misinformation and bad science. Even the internet, as crucial as it is to their exchange of ideas, poses a risk to them. They never know for sure who else might be listening in.

'Pandemic and Narration: Covid-19 Narratives in Latin America' sheds light on how, as Covid-19 spread, infecting and killing millions across the world, life not only continued to be experienced but also continued to be narrated. By putting together this volume, we help understand what happened in the region from a perspective in which, unlike most of what we saw during the health emergency, numbers, statistics and percentages are not at the centre of the analysis. The essays gathered here foreground something else: the manifold ways Covid-19 was subjectively and collectively narrated in the news, government reports, political speeches, NGO communications, social media, literature, songs and many other media. From a wide range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors to this edition pay attention to how fictional and non-fictional stories, official discourses, as well as personal and political accounts, documented, represented and shaped the health crisis, laying bare how —in Latin American countries— the spread of the virus intersected with corruption, gender-based violence, inequality and exclusion, as with community, solidarity and hope. Readers will find that the focus on narrative provides an alternative source of knowledge on Latin America’s Covid-19 experience. Our perspective contrasts with the usual emphasis on death tolls, infection rates, weekly cases, vaccination counts, and the plethora of statistics that illustrated the gravity of the situation in the build-up to, during, and after the peak of the crisis. While extremely important to understand the situation, numbers do not tell the whole story. A comprehensive picture of the pandemic can only be achieved when the stories of the virus are accounted for. Health, after all, is no stranger to narrative. And neither is Latin America.

Pandemics are large-scale epidemics that spread throughout the world. Virologists predict that the next pandemic could occur in the coming years, probably from some form of influenza, with potentially devastating consequences. Vaccinations, if available, and behavioral methods are vital for stemming the spread of infection. However, remarkably little attention has been devoted to the psychological factors that influence the spread of pandemic infection and the associated emotional distress and social disruption. Psychological factors are important for many reasons. They play a role in nonadherence to vaccination and hygiene programs, and play an important role in how people cope with the threat of infection and associated losses. Psychological factors are important for understanding and managing societal problems associated with pandemics, such as the spreading of excessive fear, stigmatization, and xenophobia that occur when people are threatened with infection. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the psychology of pandemics. It describes the psychological reactions to pandemics, including maladaptive behaviors, emotions, and defensive reactions, and reviews the psychological vulnerability factors that contribute to the spreading of disease and distress. It also considers empirically supported methods for addressing these problems, and outlines the implications for public health planning.

This volume contends that effective teachers should reflect the student population in racial and cultural terms. Employing a critical storytelling framework, respected scholars from diverse backgrounds share the teaching practices of influential teachers that they learned from. Each storyteller identifies key concepts and principles that explain why the selected teacher was so memorably effective. Contributors: Judy A. Alston • Roslyn Clark Artis • Aimeé I. Cepeda • Theodore Chao • Antonio L. Ellis • Ramon B. Goings • Lisa Maria Grillo • Nicholas D. Hartlep • Jameson D. Lopez • Shawn Anthony Robinson • Theresa Stewart-Ambo • Amanda R. Tachine • Dawn G. Williams “Each chapter offers an intimate view of what it feels like to be taught by a teacher who affirms to the student: You belong here.” —Leslie T. Fenwick, AACTE “Compellingly weaves together the voices and experiences of a diverse group of authors who dare to write toward and for freedom.” —H. Richard Milner IV, Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Education, Vanderbilt “For those who teach teachers, and for teachers everywhere, this book will serve as an invaluable resource and a source of inspiration for what can be achieved in the classroom.” —Pedro A. Noguera, Distinguished Professor and the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean, USC Rossier School of Education

"Critical Storytelling in Uncritical Times shares the stories of students and a professor in a Cultural Foundations of Education Course. Storytellers in this volume grapple with issues of white privilege, racial microaggressions, bullying , cultural barriers, immigration, and other forms of struggle in educational settings. The disciplinary backgrounds of the authors are diverse: Psychology, Communication Studies, Higher Education Administration, and Educational Foundations. The authors write stories about their role(s) in resisting (or failing to resist) hegemony, and their contributions draw attention to critical problems scholars and practitioners find in 21st century schooling. This anthology was planned, written, and edited by course participants. The stories shared in each chapter were completely at the discretion of the author. By making themselves vulnerable, participants investigated stories that mattered to them. This book engages a community of critical voices in an uncritical age."

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.

DIVShows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation./div

Creative Resilience and COVID-19 examines arts, culture, and everyday life as a way of navigating through and past COVID-19. Drawing together the voices of international experts and emerging scholars, this volume explores themes of creativity and resilience in relation to the crisis, trauma, cultural alterity, and social change wrought by the pandemic. The cultural, social, and political concerns that have arisen due to COVID-19 are inextricably intertwined with the ways the pandemic has been discussed, represented, and visualized in global media. The essays included in this volume are concerned with how artists, writers, and advocates uncover the hope, plasticity, and empowerment evident in periods of worldwide loss and struggle—factors which are critical to both overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic and fashioning the post-COVID-19 era. Elaborating on concepts of the everyday and the outbreak narrative, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 explores diverse themes including coping with the crisis through digital distractions, diary writing, and sounds; the unequal vulnerabilities of gender, ethnicity, and age; the role of visuality and creativity including comics and community theatre; and the hopeful vision for the future through urban placemaking, nighttime sociability, and cinema. The book fills an important scholarly gap, providing foundational knowledge from the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic through a consideration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, Creative Resilience and COVID-19 expands non-medical COVID-19 studies at the intersection of media and communication studies, cultural criticism, and the pandemic.

"The most revealing pandemic book yet."—The Atlantic The definitive, inside account of the Trump Administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic from White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator and Coronavirus Task Force member, Dr. Deborah Birx. In late February 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx—a lifelong federal health official who had worked at the CDC, the State Department, and the US Army across multiple presidential administrations—was asked to join the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force and assist the already faltering federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic. For weeks, she’d been raising the alarm behind the scenes about what she saw happening in public—from the apparent lack of urgency at the White House to the routine downplaying of the risks to Americans. Once in the White House, she was tasked with helping fix the broken federal approach and making President Trump see the danger this virus posed to all of us. Silent Invasion is the story of what she witnessed and lived for the next year—an eye-opening, inside account, detailed here for the first time, of the Trump Administration’s response to the greatest public health crisis in modern times. Regarded with suspicion in the West Wing from day one, Dr. Birx goes beyond the media speculation and political maneuvering to show what she was really up against in the Trump White House. Digging into the hard-fought victories, the costly mistakes, and the human drama surrounding the administration’s efforts, she examines the forces that crippled efforts to control the virus and explores why these blunders continue to haunt us today. And yet amid the agonizing missteps were bright spots that point the way forward—the fastest vaccine creation in history, governors that put their citizens’ health first, and Tribal Nations that demonstrated the powerful role of community in curbing spread, despite their criminally underfunded healthcare systems. Collectively these successes reveal the valiant work of many who were committed to saving lives, as well as highlighting the dire need to reform our public health institutions, so they are nimble and resilient enough to confront the next pandemic. With the pandemic now moving into its third year confounding two presidential administrations, Dr. Birx presents a story at once urgent and frustratingly unfinished, as Covid-19 continues to put thousands of American lives at risk. The end result is the most comprehensive and extensive accounting to date of the Trump Administration’s struggle to control the biggest health crisis in generations—a revelatory look at how we can learn from our mistakes and prevent this from happening again.