{"id":160,"date":"2022-04-05T12:12:59","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T16:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/?p=160"},"modified":"2023-04-25T13:19:45","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T17:19:45","slug":"editors-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/2022\/04\/05\/editors-note\/","title":{"rendered":"Editors’ Note"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those of us who have been living through the pandemic are unlikely to forget this extraordinary time in our lifetimes. When the BU campus shut down in March 2020, students and teachers had to quickly adapt to new modes of instruction and learning, some of them challenging, stress-inducing, or isolating. The campus that once pulsated with students and teachers became quiet as people kept away from others to slow the spread of the virus. The world around us, attitudes, habits, and ways of interacting all changed. What were we thinking when we first had to make such drastic changes in our lives?<\/span>\u00a0How did we process the events that took place? As we try to put the pandemic behind us, we may forget exactly what it felt like to be inside this moment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This special issue of the WR journal, the <\/span>Pandemic Time Capsule,<\/span><\/i> is an attempt to make sense of as well as to document what we went through and continue to go through during this time. This issue contains projects created by students in the CAS Writing Program from Spring 2020 to Fall 2022. These projects were selected by instructors, who felt that the creators did a particularly good job of registering and speaking to the experience of living through (and being a student during) a difficult time. This issue truly is a time capsule for a period we are all ready to leave behind us, but which nonetheless necessitates the timely and poignant analysis so many Writing Program students took on as a means of processing the pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n

The projects chosen include traditional academic arguments, such as Emma Kief\u2019s <\/span>analysis of the debate over mask mandates and Gillian McMahon\u2019s consideration of the dystopian nature of the pandemic. Other written, but non-academic, projects include Qi (Stacy) Wang\u2019s personal essay on ethnic stigma and Allyson Zheng\u2019s multi-genre translations of her guide to surviving the first semester of college during a pandemic. Additionally, the <\/span>Pandemic Time Capsule <\/span><\/i>features more projects in the aural and visual modes than in prior issues of the journal: Yuchen (Nikki) Li\u2019s podcast, Qi Jian\u2019s vlog from quarantine, Collin House\u2019s photographs of Myrtle Beach boardwalks, Alanis Broussard\u2019s video op-ed, Izzy Watson\u2019s TED Talk, Lily Kutner\u2019s music video, and comics from Sharlene Chang and Qiaowen Chen. Also unique in this special issue is the inclusion of less formal work, like in-class reflections, alongside more formal and polished projects.<\/span><\/p>\n

Just as we have represented a great variety of genres and media, we also see many different responses to and attitudes toward this experience. There is the personal isolation and loneliness of lockdown and remote classes. There are the public health and safety realities for people of color. At the other end of the spectrum, if readers saw only the unmasked people strolling along the boardwalk in House\u2019s photos, they might think the photos were taken before the pandemic. <\/span>Many of our student writers are Asian and some are international students for whom the pandemic, and the increase in xenophobic and racially motivated incidents that followed, added another layer of uncertainty, isolation, and fear. We hope this issue<\/span> of <\/span>WR<\/span><\/i> will give our readers the opportunity to process the pandemic from their own perspective, as well as from the perspectives and unique voices of our student writers. This issue, a document of the extraordinary events we all went through (and, in some sense, are still going through) will, hopefully, serve as a vibrant, multimodal record of student work that we can all look back on and refer to in the future.<\/span><\/p>\n

-Kevin Barents, Jessica Bozek, Malavika Shetty<\/span><\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Those of us who have been living through the pandemic are unlikely to forget this extraordinary time in our lifetimes. When the BU campus shut down in March 2020, students and teachers had to quickly adapt to new modes of instruction and learning, some of them challenging, stress-inducing, or isolating. The campus that once pulsated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17256,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17256"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":541,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions\/541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/wrjournal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}