Contesting public forgetting: Memory and policy learning in the era of Covid-19

Abstract

This article examines scholarship on public forgetting and its implications for post-disaster recovery and policy learning to theorize how tendencies toward structural amnesia risk limit policy learning as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold and as the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of new global health crises. This article will contribute to memory studies by advancing a theory of how public forgetting leads to a cascade of impacts on policy and social well-being. Building on Beiner’s work on social memory, scholarship on the politics of memory, and research on post-disaster policy learning, I show that institutional forgetting implicitly places individual and collective memories outside the public sphere in which policymaking occurs. This discourages commemorative practices that constitute the traumatic past and present of the pandemic as creating responsibilities on the part of policymakers and governments for increased protections in the present and policy learning in the future. Constituting the Covid-19 pandemic as a necessary subject of public memory, in contrast, allows individuals and communities to assert rights to restitution and accountability for the policy failures that led to profound racial and socioeconomic disparities in risks of infection, severe illness, and death. Through engaging with the memory advocacy by the nonprofit groups the We Must Count Coalition, Marked by Covid, and the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, I illustrate how commemorative practices by social movements illuminate the policy implications of contesting how collective traumas will be remembered.

This article examines scholarship on public forgetting (Connerton, 2008; VanderHaagen, 2013; Vivian, 2010) and its implications for post-disaster recovery (Monteil et al., 2020; Ullberg, 2017) to theorize how tendencies toward structural amnesia risk limiting policy learning as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold and as the climate crisis exacerbates the risk of new global health crises (Carlson et al., 2022). This article will contribute to memory studies by advancing a theory of how public forgetting leads to a cascade of impacts on policy and social well-being. Synthesizing previous scholarship on social memory, public forgetting, and post-disaster policy learning, I extend scholarship on how institutional forgetting can impact policy learning in ways that hold profound implications for health equity. I show that institutional forgetting implicitly places individual and collective memories outside the public sphere in which policymaking occurs. This discourages commemorative practices that constitute the traumatic past (and present) of the pandemic as creating responsibilities on the part of policymakers and governments for increased protections in the present and policy learning in the future. This isolation of personal and collective memory from the public sphere limits the potential for what VanderHaagen terms “politically imaginative” uses of the past as a “resource for future action.” Discouraging commemorative practices of the pandemic’s traumatic past and present impedes policymakers and governments from responding effectively to the continuing unequal impacts of Covid-19 and from addressing the long-term structural disparities rooted in systematic racism, ableism, and socioeconomic injustice.

Constituting the Covid-19 pandemic as a necessary subject of public memory, in contrast, allows individuals and communities to make political memory claims, asserting rights to restitution and accountability for the policy failures that led to profound racial and socioeconomic disparities in risks of infection, severe illness, and death. Identifying several policy areas in which such structural amnesia characterizes institutional responses to Covid-19, I discuss how advocacy groups are resisting the prospect of an unjustly forgotten Covid-19 pandemic through linking public memory to long-term policy change and justice for those severely impacted by the pandemic, including communities of color disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and the estimated 23 million Americans living with long-term complications of the virus (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2022). The nonprofit groups the We Must Count Coalition, Marked by Covid, and the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project warrant focused scholarly attention within memory studies because their commemorative practices illuminate the policy implications of contesting how collective traumas will be remembered. Agency in shaping public memory specifically is asserted as a right that enables the pursuit of restitution, accountability, and necessary policy change. While individuals and communities most impacted by Covid-19 have emerged as constituencies uniquely invested in shaping public memory and its political resonances, these advocacy efforts also emphasize public memory as a social good essential to the well-being of all community members and to future generations faced with similar crises. These groups consciously link public commemoration—through a proposed national Covid-19 Memorial Day, physical and digital commemorative events, and efforts to document Covid-19’s unequal impact—to advocacy for policy changes that address the material conditions impacting the severe toll and unequal toll of Covid-19 in the United States. All three groups engage in commemorative practices focused on seeking public recognition of the pandemic’s ongoing traumatic impact on families who have lost loved ones to the virus, patients living with Long Covid complications, and essential workers and marginalized communities traumatized by unequal risks of exposure and severe illness. In claiming a right to shape public and official representations of the pandemic, the advocacy groups discussed in this article assert a concretely political right for those most severely impacted by the pandemic to influence short-term mitigation policies and longer-term structural reforms as a component of pursuing justice for individual and collective loss. Asserting that collective memory must be reflected in official narratives, these constituencies make a moral claim against unjust functions of structural forgetting which serve to hinder policy learning.

Policy learning, institutional forgetting, and public forgetting

To conceptualize how the processes of social memory and public forgetting impact opportunities for policy change, I seek to synthesize the literatures on policy learning and institutional amnesia with memory studies scholarship (Dunlop and Radaelli, 2013). Policy learning describes the process by which political institutions incorporate knowledge of past policy outcomes, including failures or shortcomings, in their present-day response to crisis. Such learning occurs in both organizational and society-wide contexts, integrating conclusions “resulting from a combination of social interaction, personal experiences, value change and scientific policy analysis” (Kowarsch et al., 2016). In a democratic context, social movements and advocacy groups frequently articulate demands for policy learning that emerge within communities most impacted by an issue, crisis, or past policy outcome. The framework of deliberative policy learning, for instance, assumes that institutions have a responsibility to incorporate lessons that emerge from social and collective memory, as well as the lessons that emerge from internal organizational memory (Kowarsch et al., 2016). Significant research identifies institutional and broader social forgetting as barriers to effective, sustained policy learning. Institutional amnesia within governments contributes to “recycling” of policy approaches already proven ineffective (Pollitt, 2013). Such amnesia leads decision-makers to “overlook potentially valuable historical analogues, which can speed up and enhance problem solving” (Stark and Head, 2019). As Stark and Head (2019) illustrate, this institutional amnesia has both institutional and society-wide causes. In some cases, policy knowledge accrued during an organization’s initial crisis response is lost due to processes of restructuring, a failure to preserve internal records, or strategically motivated efforts to de-emphasize particular lessons. In other contexts, however, a broader “sociocultural amnesia” impacts society at large, with indirect consequences on the capacity for organizational remembering and policy learning as “the stories and storytellers that propagate historical lessons” are lost or marginalized. Thus, processes of memory and forgetting that occur within communities and in official contexts shape the urgency and commitment that institutions bring to policy learning. The marginalization of particular social memories and the resulting process of public forgetting, then, limits the ability of communities impacted by past policy failures to articulate demands for institutional accountability, restitution, and policy learning in the future.

The politics of memory

Interpretations of social crises such as pandemics are invariably negotiated and contested, a process that often reflects the power relations within societies. Different constituencies and social and political movements contest the meanings of crisis and how it should be constituted in public memory (Brito et al., 2011; Mujal-Leon and Langenbacher, 2015). This negotiation includes decisions about whether such crises will be included in public memory at all or instead preserved primarily in social memory without official recognition. Scholarship on post-disaster recovery reveals that institutional forgetting often coincides with the marginalization of particular social memories from public memory, a lack of recognition that perpetuates existing inequalities. In these contexts, forgetting functions as a barrier to policy change rooted in the needs of impacted communities, naturalizing forms of structural violence that, if publicly and continually recognized as a crisis, would warrant greater policy interventions (Vivian, 2010). Indeed, public forgetting often occurs not through a deliberative, pluralist process of reimagining political relations but through an economically motivated narrative of recovery shaped by market logics and political expediency. As Monteil et al. (2020) found in their study of post-disaster memory and forgetting, detailed, contextualized memories of natural disasters can conflict with the exigencies of redevelopment. In the wake of a volcanic eruption in Montserrat, for instance, policymakers confronted pressure “to reinvest in the exposed areas for various economic activities like tourism, sand mining, and geothermal energy production.” In this context, maintaining a public memory that extended into future concerns about industry safety would make evident the conflicting public goods of economic well-being and post-disaster learning. To counteract such imperatives for forgetting, then, requires challenging economic relations that make communities dependent on unsafe development practices for survival. What we can afford to remember, and what we are incentivized to forget, may reflect the policy implications of recognizing particular crisis impacts.

Moreover, the embodied nature of much social memory, and the ways in which spaces can implicitly and quietly evoke memories without formally commemorating them, complicates what we mean by forgetting. As Argenti (2007) and Ullberg (2017) show, “discursive silence” about a traumatic past does not indicate indifference to its legacy or a lack of historical awareness; instead, periodically “recurring” crisis impacts the relationship between memory and the future in ways that hinder memorialization (Ullberg, 2017: 30). When political and economic institutions necessitate “normalization” of continuing or recurring danger, memory may not take the form of commemoration—which implies the conclusive pastness of disaster—but rather manifest in a continued experience of vulnerability. When communities anticipate the recurrence of a disaster, it is not truly past but “present and future in their lives through daily practices and places” (Ullberg, 2017: 42). At the social level, forgetting can be imposed by policy failures that make continuing vulnerability the norm. The right to remember and commemorate past trauma becomes linked to the prospects of safety in the present and future.

Commemorative practices and events create arenas in which impacted communities can contest policies that leave communities vulnerable to preventable harm through processes of marginalization (Collins, 2008). As Fuentealba writes, commemorative events “bring together a post-disaster community to deal with a shared tragedy but also to question their current risk conditions,” particularly when factors that contributed to suffering in past crises remain unaddressed in the post-disaster context (Fuentealba, 2021: 9). Indeed, discursive representations of crisis have the potential to challenge “naturalizing narratives of risk” in which vulnerability is treated as inevitable rather than socially and politically produced. Thus, when community members seek to reshape public memory to include a causal account of vulnerabilities, they successfully re-politicize the question of risk mitigation, redefining disaster from a conclusively past event to be simply commemorated to an ongoing process that establishes responsibilities toward affected communities (Fuentealba, 2021: 9). Such a causal investigation of vulnerability is a necessary component of memory-making because social relations and policy decisions function to “facilitate the security of privileged groups” while deprioritizing the safety of those already victimized by structural injustice (Collins, 2008: 22, 26).

The limitations of public forgetting become clear when we consider how structural inequities shape what is remembered and forgotten, centered and marginalized, in prevalent historical narratives. Catlin (2021) argues for an approach to public memory that challenges “hegemonic” narratives of when crises begin and end, particularly when different degrees of vulnerability and marginalization mean that a crisis can appear “over” for some while continuing for others (p. 1460). Applying a “more expanded temporal framework” (p. 1461) to the HIV pandemic acknowledges the epidemic’s early 20th century beginnings, which often go unmentioned or underdiscussed in western-centric narratives, as well as highlighting the continuing crisis experienced by people living with HIV who have limited access to treatment in the United States and around the world. Such critical reexamination of commonplace temporalities holds crucial lessons for conceptualizing the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing in May 2022 on the decreasing visibility of the Covid-19 pandemic in collective consciousness, journalist Brigid Delaney observes the ethical dangers of forgetting a still-ongoing crisis with profoundly unequal impacts: “What we are experiencing right now is the pandemic’s social death, which is fascinating to watch from a sociological perspective (or horrifying, if you are vulnerable or immunocompromised).” If public memory or forgetting has the potential to be the process of inclusive civic deliberation that can establish a set of shared reference points and meanings, forgetting promoted in dominant narratives can also have the opposite effect, making invisible the experiences of those who cannot afford to forget, or who experience, as an ongoing crisis, a trauma that others view as conclusively past.

Public forgetting as a barrier to policy learning

Anthropologist Baez Ullberg, in her research on disaster commemoration and policy learning, finds selective omission to be one of the key elements of social forgetting that occurs within the post-disaster discourse. Because disasters are temporal events, their duration may be contested and experienced differently by different agents of memory-making. Thus, a temporal approach to disaster “asks not only when and how the risks that led to the disaster were produced, but also when and how a disaster ends—if it ever does” (Ullberg, 2017). Remembering natural disasters—and their intersection with social injustice and institutional failures—is necessary as both a social process of memorialization, in which individual and collective trauma and loss are recognized, and as a process of policy learning. Policymakers must ask “how a disaster is remembered among the people and organizations affected” before deciding how to approach the process of memorialization, as well as when devising specific institutional changes to increase future preparedness and reduce unequal impacts. Rather than a discrete process within government agencies, policy learning is intricately connected to the overall social process of remembering because the two meet in the civic sphere’s ability to shape elected officials’ actions and attitudes. “Taking people’s memories and concerns seriously” has implications for a democratic society’s inclusiveness and responsiveness to community concerns. Yet for public memory formation to operate as a “learning process to reduce future vulnerability,” policymakers must account for the complexity of how attitudes toward continuing risk are influenced by the dynamics of both memory and forgetting (Monteil et al., 2020). Policymakers recounting their memories of the Montserrat volcanic eruption, for instance, were reluctant to contextualize those memories in a knowledge landscape of continuing risk, instead engaging in a “collective effort to place the disaster in the past” and resist its connectivity to policy decisions and community preparedness. A temporality that defines disasters as past events, divorced from present and future concerns except as a subject of remembrance, reflects a narrative bias toward “stability and certainty about the future” rather than acknowledgment of continuing precarity (Monteil et al., 2020). As Erll (2020) writes, the lack of public commemorations for past pandemics has placed the risks of viral illness outside cultural reference points and what Kossalleck terms “the space of experience” on which societies collectively form their expectations of the future.

Public forgetting, then, which denies official recognition to social memories, creates a societal bias toward institutional forgetting. As Beiner writes of the 1918–1919 pandemic, collective memories “omitted from high-profile representations of memory” tend to be “kept alive often in muted and obfuscated forms,” limiting their opportunity to impact political deliberation about the policy questions raised by the social crises to which they refer (p. 47). Denying social memories a place within official narratives of the past deprives communities of the chance to “rehearse and perform memory in a public sphere,” which in turn renders social memory more incomplete and susceptible to erosion (p. 33). I argue the process of “social forgetting” observed by Beiner places individual and collective memories outside the public sphere in which, first, official remembrance is shaped and, second, policymaking occurs. This exclusion in turn has political impacts for communities and individuals most closely impacted by a crisis who struggle to assert contextually defined rights in its wake. Forgetting also has broader implications for societies at large, curtailing their capacity for policy learning, which depends on the public recognition of how past injustices affect individuals and communities.

Remembering past forgetting: revisiting earlier pandemics in the era of Covid-19

Scholarship on how the 1918–1919 pandemic has been remembered and forgotten (Beiner, 2022) illuminates how consigning pandemics to individual and social memory limits societies’ capacity for policy learning. When social memory of collective traumas are excluded from official representations of the past, communities find their agency in shaping public memory limited by a discourse that places their experiences outside the realm of political deliberation, denying the ways in which social memory creates constituencies grounded in experiences of injustice. The potential of future forgetting emerged as a profound anxiety about the ongoing pandemic early in 2020 (Freedland, 2021). The specter of a forgotten pandemic emerged in tandem with the growing concern that the public health crisis would be prematurely declared over for reasons of ideology or political and economic expedience. Writing in 2021, Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland articulated a sense of collective grief postponed, “delaying the moment of collective mourning until we can be certain it’s all over,” while also noting that the trivialization of the pandemic by political figures such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro further constricted the space for public grief and signaled a governmental failure to provide dignified “recognition of the dead.” Writing in March 2021, Monument Lab director Paul Farber and curator Patricia Eunji Kim cited the collective forgetting of 1918 as a tragedy with continuing consequences:

This chasm in our nation’s public memory begs the questions for our current predicament: What are we willing to remember? Which narratives are elevated as part of our national story? The amnesia over the 1918 pandemic has proven to endanger us, demonstrating that fuller forms of remembrance should be part and parcel of democratic participation.

At the same time, social scientists turned to previous pandemics for lessons applicable to the present. Medical historian Amy Forbes argued that situating the Covid-19 pandemic in the context of previous health crises—and in the process, revitalizing public memory of earlier pandemics—is essential for understanding and responding to the social impacts of an ongoing crisis. Public health crises have a consistent pattern of “widening existing social fissures and health disparities,” and detailed archival and memory work on these impacts serves to create a “practical past” from which policymakers can draw relevant lessons (Forbes, 2021).

Forgetting “long influenza”: implications for Covid-19 preparedness

One key impact of public forgetting in the aftermath of the 1918–19 pandemic was the resulting failure of policymakers to devote adequate resources to providing care and assistance for those who developed long-term complications or to support research on post-viral illness. While scientists and health care providers documented post-infection illness in many influenza patients, including chronic fatigue syndrome and heightened vulnerability to encephalitis lethargica (Lyons et al., 2020; Newcomb, 2020; Stefano, 2021), these impacts were largely elided by the dominant temporality through which the pandemic was framed, as an event decisively in the past (Almond, 2006; Honigsbaum and Krishnan, 2020; Hume, 2000; Ortimer, 2009). As science journalist Laura Spinney (2022) makes clear, the elision of “long influenza” from cultural memory, and the failure to recognize those who suffered long-term complications as well as those who died, had enduring consequences that shaped institutional responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. The initial non-responsiveness of policymakers to the needs of Long Covid patients echoes the earlier neglect of post-influenza complications. In addition, the lack of a legible public memory of 1918, recognized by societal institutions, elected officials, and historical curricula, found a corollary which medical anthropologist Sharon Kaufmann terms “a failure of collective memory” in response to the lasting impacts of polio (Spinney, 2022). Throughout the twentieth century, then, dominant event-focused temporalities proclaimed an “end” to crises that continued, in underrecognized ways, for more vulnerable community members outside the purview of an emerging public memory, and these temporalities shaped the levels of societal concern for those experiencing a different pandemic temporality (Blair and Michel, 2007; Bristow, 2012). As Spinney (2022) writes of the polio epidemic, the advent of vaccination produced a sense that “the problem had been solved,” and the long-term complications that affected between 20% and 85% of polio survivors in subsequent decades “failed to elicit the same level of concern” as the suffering and death at the epidemic’s height.

Public forgetting in an ongoing pandemic: policy consequences

To understand how public forgetting produces institutional forgetting, which in turn affects the policymaking process, we must investigate, borrowing Beiner’s question, how the current pandemic is being forgotten. I contend that the consequences of public forgetting in the wake of previous health crises are being repeated, as key aspects of the Covid-19 crisis are decentered in official representations of the pandemic’s past and present. Just as memories of the 1918–19 pandemic were isolated in social and familial memory and excluded from public commemoration, social memories of Covid-19’s unequal toll are being rendered invisible in official narratives through a process of public forgetting. The experiences of immunocompromised people, people living with Long Covid, and individuals and communities placed at high risk by unequal structural factors are increasingly marginalized in both official representations of the crisis and in policy responses aimed at ensuring a return to normalcy for those at the lowest risk of a severe illness. This public forgetting contributes to a process of risk naturalization wherein the role of structural factors in imposing disproportionate risk on vulnerable populations is not acknowledged. As a result, the continuing high rates of Covid infection, hospitalization, and mortality in the United States—and continuing disparities in health outcomes along racial and socioeconomic lines—are normalized precisely by their elision from an emergent public memory. This institutional forgetting has several distinct impacts on public policy. First, it serves to obscure the role of long-standing inequities in contributing to racial and socioeconomic disparities in the pandemic’s impact, undermining political will to prioritize racial and economic justice in both the immediate pandemic response and in longer-term structural change addressing the range of issues that affect social determinants of health. Second, an emergent culture of forgetting obscures the need for short-term policies—such as paid sick leave and improved Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections—to end Covid-19’s continuing, disproportionately severe impacts on populations placed at high risk by structural inequalities and/or medical vulnerabilities. Finally, such forgetting obscures the longer-term changes in the US health care system and public health infrastructure needed to anticipate and prepare for future health crises (Galvani et al., 2022).

Institutional forgetting of the pandemic’s unequal impacts is especially evident in decision-making about virus mitigation measures. In allowing the public transit mask requirement to expire, reducing the mandatory quarantine period to 5 days, and stating that mask mandates are no longer needed in health care settings, the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) has removed protections that keep public spaces accessible to immunocompromised and medically vulnerable people (Aratani, 2022). Few local or state governments resumed mitigation measures in recent Covid surges in winter 2022, when most Americans at high risk of severe Covid-19 did not have access to preventive treatments such as Evusheld and when only 26% of adults eligible for a second vaccine booster have received one (Topol, 2022). As of January 2023, Evusheld is no longer effective against new variants (Food and Drug Administration, 2023), a development that places many immunocompromised people at increased risk but has not resulted in the reinstatement of policies designed to mitigate viral spread. Thus, policy decisions have increasingly been made to prioritize the concerns of those at the lowest risk of a severe illness while neglecting the needs of those still at high risk. Public health scholars such as Cecilia Tomori have observed “individualized” approaches to Covid, which ignore “systemic inequities in vaccination” as well as in access to treatment and paid sick leave (Boyens et al., 2022; Tomori et al., 2022).

The grim milestone of one million US deaths from Covid-19 occurred in May 2022 at a time when confident declarations of the pandemic’s ensuing end were prevalent, and after several months in which protective measures had been eliminated with the lifting of federal and state mask mandates and the scaling back of remote work options and pandemic-specific OSHA protections (Abrams, 2022; Charles, 2022; Hsu, 2021; Yong, 2022). The narrative of an imminently ending pandemic has been instrumentalized to justify eliminating protections for elderly and immunocompromised people experiencing homelessness in New York City, with the city’s Department of Health and Human Services announcing it would “no longer automatically place homeless people 70 and older in single rooms and those 66 and older in double rooms” to limit their risk of exposure to the virus (Lan, 2022). This policy change was announced, moreover, amid growing evidence that the lack of social supports for people living with Long Covid was creating a new homelessness crisis (Yuko, 2022).

Improvements in workplace protections, guarantees of paid sick leave, and accommodations for immunocompromised people had the potential to emerge as a lasting, constructive legacy of the pandemic which expands the inclusiveness and accessibility of public spaces (Jones-Axtell, 2022; Milczarek-Desai, 2022, 2023). Indeed, in 2021, the Biden administration took several steps to protect workplace safety, which together articulated an expanded understanding of workers’ rights and of a human right to health, applied in this case as the right to reasonable protections from infection. In January 2021, the administration announced it would provide unemployment insurance to any individual who resigned from their job due to inadequate protection from Covid-19 infection, such as a failure to observe social distancing and mask requirements or pressure for employees to work when infected (Smith, 2021; U.S. Department of Labor, 2021). Subsequently in June 2021, OSHA issued temporary emergency standards requiring health care employers to ensure their employees had access to protective equipment and adequate ventilation systems and were notified of exposure to Covid-19, as well as providing “recourse to OSHA if their employer was out of compliance” (Baldwin, 2022). While 20 senators and 101 representatives formally called for the administration to make these protections permanent, the agency allowed the order to expire in January 2022 amid the Omicron surge. Similarly, several states have enacted requirements for updated ventilation to limit viral transmission in all workplaces, not limited to health care settings, but OSHA has not developed a similar initiative at the federal level. Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on frontline workers illustrates that the pandemic’s lessons, and the societal changes made in response, cannot be limited to the realm of health communications and public health infrastructure but also must encompass efforts to address the social determinants of health in housing, workplace protections, and health care access (Dubay et al., 2020).

Employers have also increasingly rolled back Covid mitigation measures and accommodations introduced in 2020 to protect immunocompromised people, even as medically vulnerable people remain at heightened risk of severe illness due to the emergence of more transmissible variants, the end of mitigation measures such as mask requirements and social distancing, and the continued difficulty in accessing preventive treatments such as Evusheld (McCausland, 2022; Mendoza, 2022; Yong, 2022). Remote work not only helped people in high-risk groups remain safe but also made work more accessible for many (Ameri and Kurtzberg, 2022). As some companies resist making such accommodations permanent, a kind of institutional forgetting takes place in which the experiences of those who benefited from, and continue to need, such structural changes become silenced. The Biden administration’s recent announcement that free access to Covid vaccines, testing, and treatment would be phased out in 2023, with preventive tools and treatments being commercialized and distributed by insurance providers, raises further concerns about the policy impacts of institutional forgetting.

Public memory, political deliberation, and policy learning

The preceding sections of this article traced the mechanisms through which public forgetting impacts institutional commitments to policy learning, limiting the discursive space in which communities can seek restitution. I now propose turning toward the ways that communities and social movements seek to reshape public memory in response to such official forgetting, both to secure the epistemic justice of having individual and collective trauma recognized and as a way of exercising political agency. In theorizing how such memory advocacy has the potential to impact policy, I draw on VanderHaagen’s analysis of memory as an agential spiral, in which sites of memory are translated into “new stories about the possibility of future action” through a process of refiguration and configuration. The “textual” substance of memories is politically impactful in shaping relationships and communities in the present-day. As a result, the mimetic nature of reinterpretation and meaning-making empowers a wide range of community members—including political figures, advocacy and activist groups, and historians, as well as individuals directly impacted by an event—to exercise agency in shaping public memory that functions as a “resource for future action” (VanderHaagen, 2013: 195).

By seeking to exercise agency in shaping public memory, social movements can actively resist unjust forms of public forgetting, particularly at pivotal moments in memory formation that function as constitutive moments. Three social movements formed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic—the advocacy group Marked by Covid, the research collective the We Must Count Coalition, and the patient advocacy group the Covid-19 Long Haulers Advocacy Project—seek to ensure that the virus’s unequal impacts receive official commemoration that informs short-term and long-term policymaking. These groups’ commemorative practices all assert a right for those most severely impacted by Covid-19 to shape public memory of the crisis and a concomitant right for these constituencies to have their needs and concerns centered in policy responses, where they are currently marginalized. The role of commemorative practice in these groups’ policy advocacy, then, holds important insights for the relationship between public memory, political participation, and policy learning.

The national advocacy group Marked by Covid, founded in June 2020, has developed several key commemorative practices that center the need for social memories of Covid-19 and its unequal impacts to be recognized in official commemorative efforts (Marked by Covid, 2021). These commemorative practices include archival work and digital storytelling; advocacy for permanent physical memorial sites; and a policy platform that specifically links public memorialization to policy change. Personal stories shared on the group’s website highlight how the lack of workplace protections, including personal protective equipment and paid sick leave, placed community members at heightened risk. Founder Kirstin Urquiza, who lost her father to Covid-19 in March 2020, argues that commemorative practices should acknowledge how policy failures and structural inequities have directly led to preventable deaths. Marked by Covid volunteers have publicized personal stories of loss, including policy decisions and structural factors in their discussion of Covid-19 rather than attributing deaths solely to the virus itself. For instance, Urquiza emphasizes that her state’s governor, Doug Ducey, misled the public with claims that it was “safe to resume normal activities” even as “as the state surged with COVID cases and her childhood neighborhood of Maryvale—a low-income community with a large population of immigrants and Latinx residents—recorded some of the worst numbers on the planet” (Marked by Covid, 2021). In highlighting how local governors’ decision-making ignored the virus’s disproportionate toll on low-income communities and people of color, Marked by Covid links memorialization to restitutive justice and policy learning.

These efforts to document pandemic losses in a way that situates individual stories in structural contexts have been accompanied by advocacy focused on future commemoration, calling for “a national memorial on the National Mall and memorials in every state to provide permanent, public space for mourning and remembrance” and “oral history projects to capture the stories of essential workers, victims and survivors, and public health experts.” In calling for official sites of memory that are both publicly funded and situated in prominent sites of national remembrance, among other memorials on the National Mall, advocates claim a right for social memories of the pandemic to receive official recognition and shape public memory specifically. The National Mall is a site at the forefront of American public memory, including the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial and monuments to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and servicemen in both world wars. Its proximity to symbols and centers of political decision-making, including the US Capitol, further accentuate the potential link between public memory and policymaking, potentially serving as a reminder to elected officials of Covid-19’s devastating impact and the gravity of policy issues related to mitigating pandemic harms.

Finally, a third commemorative practice emerges in the form of direct policy advocacy. In its policy platform, Marked by Covid outlines five policy priorities—recognition, response, recovery, restitution, and resilience. In prefacing detailed policy proposals with a call for communities’ experiences of Covid-19 to be included in public memory, the authors present official representations of the pandemic as part of the democratic public sphere which community members have a right to access and reshape. Asserting this right to be included in public memory, in turn, foregrounds a particular way of thinking about the Covid-19 policy response, beginning with the recognition that memory constituencies—those most severely impacted by the pandemic due to medical vulnerabilities and structural inequities—should be centered in decision-making about short-term virus mitigation and long-term policy learning. The platform goes on to call for steps to protect those at continued risk of severe illness—including increased investment in vaccine distribution, “data-informed” standards for reinstating mask requirements, and expanded health care coverage—and long-term recovery measures focused on ensuring that “people who are elderly, disabled, chronically ill, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color do not fall further behind.” Marked by Covid articulates this memory-focused advocacy as a component of its broader activism for substantive policy change, arguing that such sites of remembrance and witnessing can ensure “a tragedy like this never happens again.”

Public memory and Long Covid patient advocacy

Long Covid patient advocacy groups have articulated a similar understanding of how commemorative practice—particularly, claiming a right for marginalized experiences to shape and be included in public memory—has the potential to shape policy learning. Since Long Covid emerged as a growing crisis beginning in 2020, patient advocacy groups have critiqued how official narratives of the pandemic deprioritize the needs of people living with Long Covid and understate the risk of Long Covid for the general public in decisions about mitigation measures (Wenner and Ramirez, 2022).

The Covid-19 Long Hauler Advocacy Project, a nonprofit that works to help people living with Long Covid in navigating treatment options, has called on federal agencies and elected officials to formally recognize the condition “as a disabling event” and ensure access to social support for those who have been disabled by a post-viral illness. In an open letter to members of the Congress, the advocacy group highlighted how Long Covid intersects with economic inequality and precarity, unequal access to health care, and an underfunded social security program to leave many Long Covid patients “unable to cover basic needs” including medical expenses (Covid-19 Long Hauler Advocacy Project, 2021). The Biden administration has committed to identifying “early intervention strategies for workers who experience injuries or illnesses, including Long COVID, when working” to ensure that “disability policies and benefits” include those affected by the post-viral illness, while the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the US Department of Veterans Affairs have launched efforts to expand medical knowledge about risk factors and treatment options for Long Covid (The White House, 2022). However, critics have noted that President Biden has not acknowledged Long Covid’s impact in highly visible statements on Covid-19, including his remarks in the 2022 State of the Union, and have raised concerns that Long Covid patients’ experiences will be excluded from the “narrative of the pandemic” and efforts to commemorate it (Covid-19 Long Hauler Advocacy Project, 2022; Network for Long Covid Justice, 2022). In addition, the NIH has faced criticism for failing to address Long Covid with the urgency it warrants despite being allocated $1.2 billion for that purpose. As journalist Rachel Cohrs reports, patients have raised concerns that the agency is “taking on vague, open-ended research questions rather than testing out therapies or treatments, and that it is not being fully transparent with patient advocates and researchers” (Cohrs, 2022). Some patients have reported continuing skepticism and denial within the medical community about Long Covid (Cooney, 2021; Mariani, 2022). Moreover, the exclusion of Long Covid from public discourse and public health messaging, which has primarily focused on the risks of acute illnesses, constitutes an epistemic injustice against the millions of people impacted by post-viral complications, in which Long Covid patients are “frequently disbelieved” by medical staff and their needs and concerns omitted from public discourse about pandemic-related policy (Ireson et al., 2022).

These shortcomings in the policy response to Long Covid indicate, in part, the lasting harm of structural amnesia regarding the long-term impacts of earlier pandemics and the resulting dearth of medical knowledge and policy precedents. For many patient advocates, then, including Long Covid in public memory of the pandemic is essential to ensuring their experiences are recognized rather than rendered invisible and also to ensuring that governments prioritize research on Long Covid treatments and social support for patients and their families. In addition, a public memory that includes long-term complications and post-viral illness is essential to shaping appropriate mitigation policies while the pandemic continues (Roberts and Khatar, 2022). As growing medical literature documents post-infection health risks, including cardiovascular and neurological complications, the marginalization of Long Covid from public memory means that the public is underinformed about the risks of infection (Sidik, 2022; Xu et al., 2022). Conversely, raising awareness about Long Covid could pave the way for more robust policy interventions to reduce the risk of workplace infection, better protect those in congregant living situations, and reduce overall rates of transmission.

Structural racism, health disparities, and public memory

Public memory functions as a component of the public sphere, in which the right to shape official narratives of past crisis discursively enables particular types of political engagement related to policy learning. This dynamic becomes especially apparent when examining the role of systematic racism in current and previous health crises. Drexler (2020) and Krishnan et al. (2020) highlight how the 1918 pandemic was unequally forgotten along racial lines. While the pandemic as a whole was marginalized in public memory, more precise records exist of influenza’s impact on predominantly white communities, while “the impact on communities of color in 1918—in particular, African Americans—was often relegated to footnotes” (Drexler, 2020). Public health records may have underreported influenza deaths in Black communities, and while data indicate that Black Americans had lower overall mortality rates than their white counterparts, they were at higher risk of dying if infected due to unequal access to health care and the health impacts of environmental racism. The danger of similar omissions in public records, and resulting erasure in public memory, shaped responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Amid early concerns that the CDC and local public health agencies were inadequately documenting racial and socioeconomic disparities in Covid-19 infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, an alliance of health equity and civil rights advocates launched the We Must Count Coalition to call for “systematic tracking of COVID-19 testing, cases, health outcomes, and mortality rates using data disaggregated by race, ethnicity, primary language, gender, disability status, and socioeconomic status” (Bion, 2020; Drexler, 2020).

Concerns about incomplete data collection highlight the link between disinvestment in public health infrastructure, long-standing inequities in health care access, and structural racism within and beyond the medical system and lay the groundwork for unjust forms of public forgetting. If the unequal impacts of a pandemic are not documented fully to begin with, these aspects of the crisis are more likely to be omitted from historical curricula, policy reports, and other sites of memory and archival texts. The urgency of remembering pandemics may be less apparent if their intersection with broader social inequities is not centered in discussions of what can be learned from past and ongoing crises. As sociologist Adia Wingfield noted, “we could potentially be facing long-term catastrophic gaps in care and coverage” without comprehensive patient data (Bion, 2020).

In mobilizing to ensure better documentation of how structural racism exacerbates pandemic outcomes, the We Must Count Initiative’s archival work may have a lasting impact on public memory’s relationship to policy change. As Covid-19’s disproportionate impact on Black Americans became well-documented, elected officials and social movements argued that the pandemic itself should be remembered and memorialized as a continuation of systemic racism’s perpetuation of health inequities, rather than being treated as a discreet event (Catlin, 2021). The 2021 Anti-Racism in Public Health Act, introduced by Representative Ayanna Pressley and Senator Elizabeth Warren, calls for the CDC to establish a national center focused on anti-racism and health and to develop a “law enforcement violence prevention program” (Pressley, 2021). Pressley and Warren placed Covid-19 in a longer history of structural racism impacting public health, identifying “inequitable access to quality health care and long-term services and supports,” unequal access to health insurance, structural racism in maternal care, and unequal investment in “home and community-based services” in communities of color as key factors in creating long-standing racial and socioeconomic disparities in health outcomes (Pressley, 2021). Moreover, they identified disproportionate police violence against Black Americans as a public health crisis warranting documentation and intervention by the CDC (Cineas, 2021). In proposing major changes within the CDC, Representative Pressley and Senator Warren also intervened in discussions of how the pandemic should be remembered, emphasizing that its full impact on American society could not be understood in isolation from longer histories of marginalization and oppression.

This legislative effort emerged amid growing recognition in the medical and public health professions that structural racism itself constitutes a public health crisis in the United States. As social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger (2020) observed, memories of the pandemic became inextricably connected, for many Americans, with the political crises and traumas that have overlapped and continue to overlap chronologically, as well as causally, with the unequal impacts of Covid-19. The murder of George Floyd in June 2020, and the nationwide protests that followed, occurred as the inadequate nature of the US’s Covid-19 response became painfully clear. Throughout the spring of 2020, the Trump administration agitated for a premature reopening of businesses with few safeguards in place while failing to provide adequate protective equipment to essential workers, including health care workers (Wiley and Bagenstos, 2020). Federal and state policies that favored a swift reopening of the economy actively devalued the lives of those at high risk of severe illness, which disproportionately included Black Americans. Moreover, police violence compounded the trauma of working in already unsafe environments, as during curfews imposed in major cities, health care and other essential workers faced police harassment while commuting to or from their workplaces (Kine and Naples-Mitchell, 2021). In his critique of news coverage that disproportionately focused on isolated instances of violence at Black Lives Matter protests, author Jericho Brown (2020) argued that police brutality and governmental neglect of public health should be understood as entwined crises:

Their entire lives, these protesters have known the truth about police brutality. More recently, though, they’ve weathered coronavirus-related deaths and illnesses of parents, grandparents and friends. (Floyd himself recovered from the virus before his killing).

They’re aware of all the ways our government enabled the spread of the virus, and they know they risk their own health when they gather to declare their need for something more than reform when it comes to policing. They found out about the baffling killings of people including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade after having sheltered in place for many weeks (Brown, 2020).

Thus, the pandemic’s place in collective memory has been shaped by its intersection with longer histories of political injustice. At the same time, tendencies toward public forgetting reflect memory’s role in marginalizing some experiences of social crisis and centering others. Short-lived commitments to policy change followed by a process of institutional forgetting have defined both the Covid-19 response and elected officials’ statements on substantive efforts to address structural racism’s impact on policing. By August 2021, 209 local governments, education boards, and public health agencies across the United States had formally recognized racism as a public health crisis. The American Public Health Association (APHA)’s analysis of these statements found they were accompanied by a range of policy commitments. Common steps included “establishing accountability measures” for improving racial equity, “strengthening partnerships with community organizations” doing anti-racist advocacy work, and improving data collection on racial disparities in health outcomes (APHA, 2021). Few local governments, however, announced major changes to how government resources would be used, with only two jurisdictions—Everrett and Sommerville, Massachusetts—formally committing to “redirect funding from the police department(s) to public health or racial equity efforts” and only 30 resolutions including a commitment to “pursue funding or resources to address systemic racism/for the purpose of pursuing equity efforts” (APHA, 2021). While the recognition of racism as a public health issue marks a significant shift in national discourse, local governments have proven reluctant to make the policy changes necessary to address these inequities, and there is a risk that such resolutions will remain largely symbolic. In this context, the failure to implement policy changes to address structural racism’s health impacts, or to improve overall Covid-19 mitigation efforts and preparedness for future pandemics, mirrors the institutional forgetting of 2020 commitments to substantial police reform and a reallocation of funding from policing to other public services. Biden’s 2020 proposal for a national police oversight commission, for instance, has yet to be implemented (Barron-Lopez, 2021), while federal funding for police departments has continued to increase despite concerns that excessive police funding leads to militarized approaches to policing and diverts needed resources from public health, education, transit, and other vital functions of government (Doyle and Sakala, 2021; Ray, 2020).

Conclusion

Synthesizing literature in memory studies, anthropology, and public policy, I extend Beiner’s analysis of social forgetting, including its fragmenting effects on collective memory (Beiner, 2022: 67), to illuminate the role of public forgetting in marginalizing the experiences of those most severely impacted by social crises. I have shown that when communities most severely impacted by a crisis find their memories and experiences excluded from official commemorative practices, such public forgetting erodes discursive contexts in which those impacted can make political memory claims, advocating for restitution, accountability, and improved mitigation or preventive policies. Public forgetting renders invisible the policy issues crucial to addressing a still-ongoing crisis. Moreover, such public forgetting reduces societal preparedness for future crises by limiting political incentives for policy learning. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, I examine how these processes of public forgetting are evident in the abandonment of virus mitigation measures that protect those at high risk of severe illness and the parallel abandonment of political action to address the role of systematic racism, socioeconomic injustice, and an unequal health care system in shaping the pandemic’s profoundly unequal impacts in the United States.

After examining the harmful impacts of public forgetting, I turn to the ways that social movements responding to the unequal impacts of Covid-19 articulate demands for political justice rooted in memory claims. The efforts of social groups such as the We Must Count Coalition, the Covid-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, and Marked by Covid illustrate that diverse constituencies can resist these trends toward unjust public forgetting. By examining these social movements’ commemorative practices, I highlight how memory advocacy can assert a right to shape public memory as a component of advocating for broader structural change, including restitution for past and ongoing harms and policy learning to address health inequities and injustices.

Author biography

Sydney Goggins is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. Her research focuses on the intersections between public memory and the rhetoric of health and medicine.