This Projects investigates the role of framing processes in how individuals and communities form understandings of major current events, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. This global health crisis is unique not only for its unprecedented magnitude
and severity, but also for the media environment in which occurs. Government organizations, news media, online groups, local communities, and individual persons all interact as they seek to communicate about, understand, orient toward, and situate
themselves in relation to events unfolding in real time. These diverse actors continually frame and reframe events across multiple communication platforms in ways that reinforce, undermine, subvert, fracture, or even entirely replace one another.

It is important to understand not only the dynamics of these processes themselves but also how they relate with individual, community, and societal beliefs and behaviors.
To analyze framing as a process that occurs within a diverse media ecology, this project applies qualitative methods from media studies, health humanities, and science and technology studies to analyze dominant framings of the pandemic, as well as how
people understand their responses to and participation in those framings.