Abstract
Widespread school closures due to the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic have left U.S. parents—especially mothers—doing increasing amounts of family labor as they oversee their children’s remote learning. In this article, I reflect on the process of interviewing 112 U.S. parents, primarily mothers, about their experiences of pandemic‐related school closures, amidst the pandemic itself. These interviews were largely intensely emotional experiences. I reflect on the emotions of both respondents and researcher to argue that carrying out such interviews in the midst of a crisis can function as a form of care work. I propose the idea of a feminist public sociology of the pandemic that has three primary aims: bearing witness to the experiences of those impacted by the pandemic, making a record of those experiences, and helping scholars and the public to think about the pandemic sociologically, ideally in such a way that will aid in the creation of policy responses that address and reduce this suffering.
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