Author: Miyuki Mihira

In the past seven weeks we have accomplished so much work! We have currently completed 38 interviews ranging from around 10 minutes to over an hour and plan to get at least 11 (including the ones of ourselves) more done in the remaining two weeks. Our initial goal for our collection was to verbally and visually represent the theme of displacement during COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how physical and/or emotional separation has affected many Carleton Students and we have largely done this through our set of interviews and some pictures. This also ties into the larger goals of the Plague Year archive as one of their expressed intentions was to share “both traumatic and dislocating moments in this year of the pandemic” as well as those “moments of unexpected joy.” We have questions that have elicited both from our interviewees and we have done it primarily through a somewhat audio history format which was one of the suggested ways to share stories.

Through our interviews, we have tried to get as many voices as we can though the large majority of them have ended up being in some way connected to one of the three of us because those are the interviews that ended up being both easiest to set up due to limited time and access. We did, however, also reach out through the class pages on Facebook to see who was interested in sharing their story. We got 19 responses and while not every one panned out into an interview, this did give us a few interviews with people we otherwise had no connection with. It was also very encouraging to see the enthusiastic response from our peers and their willingness to support the historical record. 

Moving forward we are hoping to start wrapping up our interviews and beginning the process of curation. We will still upload most of the full interviews (unless there was a reason to cut them or make them transcription or audio only) onto the archive, but we also want to use pieces of them to make an easily digestible and shareable exhibit. Our game plan is that we will complete all of our interviews by the end of the 8th week, and then we will conduct the inter-group reflection interviews at the beginning of the 9th week. After these are completed, our main focus will be on creating the exhibit, and selecting parts of interviews to present.      

For my Students’ Displacement project, I’ve done three interviews with Carleton students who are either staying on campus or staying at someone’s house. Through those interviews, I found some difficulties in conducting an interview online and asking personal and sometimes sensitive questions that mostly pertain to the interviewees’ current situations. Since I knew the three interviewees, it seemed relatively easy to make a setting where they can speak comfortably. I started the conversation by catching up on things and got some recent updates that might include what they would be talking about during the interview. However, once I pressed the recording button and formally started the interview, sometimes they talked less about their personal things than they did before the interview, in our even more casual conversation. Occasionally, I made some follow up questions to dig deeper into their stories, but I was still not sure about how deep I could ask them.

Also, one of the interviewees let me hear a fairy sensitive story that I had never known. I asked more about the story with some additional questions, but after answering all the questions, eventually, she asked me not to use her name–make the interview anonymous. This interview made me re-realize that this interview process was personal and vulnerable to share with the public. I think the interviewing process, especially in interviewing about personal topics, requires an interviewer to make sure how much we can share with the public beforehand, including if we can share the recorded video or not and if the interviewee is comfortable with sharing all the contents mentioned during the interview with the public.

The goal of our collection is to verbally and visually represent the theme of displacement during COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how physical and/or emotional separation has affected many Carleton Students. Displacement during this crisis can take various forms, ranging from physical separation from family to the feeling of isolation while living at home. Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 is trying to understand this historical moment through a variety of perspectives, and we believe displacement during this pandemic is a common theme for college students, which has the potential to result in a valuable collection of rich personal stories.      

Our Method:

Since the project goal is to collect detailed stories from numerous students, we have divided the interview process into two sections. The first section is asynchronous, in which interviewees will be sent a short set of introductory questions (name, major, etc.) and then will be asked to complete a brief prompt. This prompt will ask students either to write a short story or share a couple of photos (with explanations) that serve as an embodiment of their experiences during this pandemic. This section will provide a consistent either written or visual component to all of our interviews that can stand alone if need be. Participants will be asked to complete this section before continuing with the rest of the interview. The second section will be synchronous, in which we will conduct and record an interview over video chat. We have created a set of questions that we’ll be asking in order to document the unique experience of our interviewee and discover the ways in which they feel and are affected by displacement. 

Examples of our core questions:

• How has your removal from a normal Carleton life impacted your educational experience and ability to do coursework?
• What new habits or practices have you developed to help make this transition more familiar and comfortable?
• What is something you think should be preserved in public memory about this time?

This is only a taste of the questions 😉 Please come back for the full interviews once the collection is completed!