About the project

Begun in May 2020, Rituals in the Making is an ongoing research project that examines pandemic loss and its lived consequences—that is, the significance and effect of 1.2 million lives lost to COVID-19 in the United States and 7.1 million across the globe.

Rituals in the Making is based in the Anthropology Department at George Washington University, and our current research team is made up of a small group of scholars, artists, activists, and the bereaved.

While initially centered on COVID death, mourning, and memorialization, the project’s scope has expanded to study how the pandemic has urged or resurfaced more generalizable questions about expertise, authority, and knowledge production; about the relationship between remembering and forgetting; and about how societies understand and narrate contested pasts.

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Left: Sarah Wagner helps prepare luminaries for a memorial event in Washington DC, July 26, 2021. Photo by Alejandro Perez. Right: Signage at the In America: How Could This Happen . . . installation in November 2021. Photo by Sarah Wagner.

In pursuing this expanded scope, we ask, for example:

  • What constitutes expertise?
  • Who decides and acts on it?
  • What happens when narratives of the past don’t align?
  • What’s the role of collective memory in a democracy?

Much of our research activities and findings is chronicled on this website in the form of “Dispatches from the Field.” We invite you to explore these essays (and photo essays) that stretch back to our first months of digital ethnographic research and capture our more contemporary research questions and activities.

See, for example:

Long-term goals


Pandemic loss has no clear beginning and end. With that recognition, Rituals in the Making has set several long-term goals for the project, ones forged from international collaborations and inspired by a shared commitment to resist — even as we study them—forms of revisionism and denialism.

Some of our goals include:

  • Continuing to build the “More Than a Healthcare Hero,” oral history archive, documenting experiences and narratives from healthcare professionals in the United States and beyond.
  • Continuing to develop a comparative perspective of not only the pandemic and its contested narratives, but also of collective memory more broadly, partnering with scholars and activists in the UK and Brazil.
  • Convening an international conference on COVID, commemoration, and collective memory in March 2030, to mark the decade since the pandemic’s onset.
  • Establishing a national COVID memory archive based at the George Washington University.

Where we began

An on-campus, in-person meeting of research assistants working on COVID commemoration, September 2022

Photo by Richard Grinker


When COVID began, Rituals in the Making focused its attention on how pandemic confinement and isolation were changing the way people grieve and remember. We posed a simple but challenging question: How do we mourn when we cannot gather in person? Much of the first three years of the project examined how rituals — such as funerals and memorials — were adapted to virtual spaces through platforms like Zoom and FaceTime, and how communities of mourners sought to memorialize their lost loved ones through social media platforms. We also considered the impact of misinformation about the virus on mourning and remembrance and the longer-term effects of extended grief and delayed or suspended rituals.

These research concerns and our findings form the foundation of the project’s current, broader focus. We are grateful to the funding that supported the research from 2020-2025:

  • Funerary Practices, Pandemic Confinement, and the Implications for COVID-19 Transmission (2020-2021), was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-2029839).
  • Death in an Age of Misinformation (2021-2022), was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation through the George Washington University’s Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics (IDDP)
  • Memorialization, Contested Knowledge, and the Sociopsychological Impacts of Disinformation in the Context of COVID-19 (2022-2025), also funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-2148920).