Stewart: Prisoner Support Volunteer

Michelle Fishburne’s Who We Are Now: Stories of What Americans Lost and Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic documents the lived experiences of Americans during 2020–2021 through 100 first-person vignettes, drawn from in-person interviews conducted during a 12,000-mile RV journey across the United States. A former international attorney turned digital nomad, Fishburne employs a mobile ethnographic approach that privileges face-to-face interaction, capturing affective nuances often flattened in virtual communication.

Each vignette responds to a single prompt—“What was your 2020 supposed to be like and what did it end up being?”—offering a raw, unmediated view of individual adaptation, resilience, and loss. Voices span a wide demographic, including healthcare workers, teachers, small business owners, and formerly incarcerated individuals, reflecting the pandemic’s uneven toll across race, class, and geography. Presented without editorial framing, the narratives adhere to cinéma vérité principles, preserving the integrity of participants’ voices and contributing to an emergent archive of pandemic memory.

The vignette “Stewart: Prison Support Volunteer” focuses on a volunteer supporting individuals recently released from prison, highlighting how COVID-19 intensified structural barriers to re-entry. Issues of housing insecurity, food access, and employment are shown to be critical and often insurmountable in a moment when public health systems were overburdened and social services destabilized. Fishburne’s choice to include this account situates incarceration and re-entry within broader discussions of systemic inequity during the pandemic, underscoring how vulnerability was not uniformly distributed. As a whole, Who We Are Now functions as a time capsule and counter-archive, documenting the granular texture of American life during a national crisis. It contributes to scholarship on oral history, life writing, and public health humanities, while offering a valuable tool for examining how narrative mediates collective trauma and social transformation.