As part of the COVID-19 Rapid Relief project at ASU’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict, students from ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication produced stories on the impact of COVID-19 on underserved groups. With guidance from professional reporters, the student journalists connected with local community members—including Native Americans, immigrants, refugees, and prison advocates—to raise awareness about the challenges they are facing.
Cronkite student journalists teamed up with two Arizona Republic reporters last summer to produce a series of stories about COVID-19’s outsized toll on some of the Southwest’s most vulnerable communities, including Native Americans, immigrants and refugees.
The series — intended to raise public awareness about the issue — is archived in “A Journal Of The Plague Year,” a curatorial collaborative initiated by ASU’s School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, and is part of a larger initiative called the ASU/Luce COVID-19 Rapid Relief project. The New York-based Henry Luce Foundation funded the program and partnered with the ASU Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict to deliver COVID-19 relief services and resources to underserved Arizona communities. Two ASU professors, John Carlson and Tracy Fessenden, oversaw the program’s implementation.
Cronkite students produced a wide range of content covering a variety of populations in Arizona.