Category: Work with Communities

In the past few weeks, we have amassed a large, if somewhat unusual collection of sources ranging from government and school documents on education policy to individual statements on life under Covid-19 lockdowns. Most of the resources cluster around three areas, rural West Virginia, rural Wisconsin, and small towns in the Pacific Northwest offering an ability to compare similar communities in various regions of the country, though there is little examination of the effects on larger cities that have been more thoroughly reported on by major news outlets. These collections are somewhat disparate, and reflect different interests and networks that Rebecca, Jacob, and McLain could access, yet they serve to create a sliver of insight into the lives and relationships of students, elders, and communities during this time. 

 Coming in, we were interested in how the coronavirus pandemic was affecting different generations. We especially wanted to focus on the impacts to children and the elderly and we wanted to capture how these groups were adapting to the pandemic and what their experiences have been. We have been able to meet our goals of connecting with students and the elderly in some senses. That being said we have run into roadblocks at times during the collection process. Many points of view are tough to get during this time so we have had to reconcile that with our goals. Many of our initial ideas for sources have also been tough to reach but we have still been able to talk to a good group of people. Rebecca has been able to get some elderly and student perspectives in her work with her network and McLain and Jacob have both been able to get a variety of sources from children. While we still have to contemplate the voices we are getting and the difficulties in getting sources during this time, we have all been able to meaningfully contribute to our goal of documenting generational divides in the pandemic.

While this work is an entry point into a more diverse sharing of voices, the work of archiving and outreach is by no means over. The voices of children and elders have always been underrepresented in archival records and in a moment when these groups are being disproportionately impacted by illness, isolation, poverty, and lack of technology, these silences will only be exacerbated. Through our work, we have tried to capture the realities of this period for these people, from sweeping policies affecting the education of children, down to the individual reactions of students and elders in a few areas around the country. Yet, beyond this search for individual voices, we also sought to create and test mediums and methods for including these perspectives, wrestling with persistent problems, and, hopefully, offering ideas and clues for future researchers interested in expanding the reach of our archiving project. Week after week, one of our consistent activities was simple outreach, speaking with teachers, students, and elders about why we value their experiences and asking them to share their knowledge with us, and generations to come. We plan to use these experiences and the stories and documents we have collected in an exhibit that looks at the ways in which Covid-19 has impacted people across generational divides, and the ways in which these communities have adapted to foster inter-generational support, share wisdom, and find ways to survive during the pandemic. 

My collection of items is not what I originally thought it would be. My goal with my collection was to try and capture the stories of the strangers in society, to prevent them from being lost. I thought it best to focus on marginalized groups, such as immigrants, homeless, disabled, and exiled, however, this proved to be more challenging than I anticipated. Over the course of the term instead of finding these stories, I encountered other stories such as more overarching trends in communities whether it was chalk art or Minecraft servers. Additionally, I never imagined I would interview so many people and collect their stories, however, it is their experiences that make up the largest portion of the collection. Even though most of these stories do not deal with the marginalization and strangeness that I was seeking, they still reveal a strangeness in the world we live in and their desire to share it. Each individual I interviewed, connected their experiences to a broader impact of the pandemic, however, their description of the trend was still unique to them. Lastly I have found several editorials which describe the strangers and how the pandemic has impacted them.

As these weeks have progressed and even more so this past week, I have felt that the direction of my project is natural and is the best way I can help capture the pandemic. During Wednesday’s class when Kathleen Peralta came in to speak about the importance of narrowing in a project rather than trying to capture everything. I found this message to be powerful and I realized I had been trying to capture many different experiences but instead I should have accepted my role as a historical interpreter and let myself capture the stories of a much smaller group. For my group especially it was more difficult for us to agree on a direction, because we each had our own goals in mind and a specific direction we wanted to take our project. Even though we tried to compromise and broaden our topic range, our goals are loosely grouped together, however, our items are more similar than I think any of us expected.

I am happy with the work I have achieved, especially with the stories I have recorded, which all provide some fascinating insights. For the next two weeks I hope to finalize my items and post all of the interviews as well as possibly conduct a few more, but those are up in the air. I am hoping to include a few more editorials, however, I want these to be focused on a particular group. Lastly, as a group I hope we will interview each other about this experience and if not I may include my a document of my own thoughts and experiences during a pandemic. Self reflection is needed alongside the compiling of other people’s experiences. I am happy with the direction the archive has taken and I can not wait to see how it is finalized over these next two weeks.

Over the course of the term, our project has evolved out of abstraction and into several specific lines of inquiry that have kept us busy and focused. Elias has spent much of the term focusing on public signage, with a particular focus on how public warnings/requests/mandates at this time seem both authoritative and highly vulnerable to the whims of the general population. He has focused his collecting largely on sites at which this negotiation seems most poignant and/or contested. This specific focus has developed as, throughout the term, he has sought to incorporate more of his own personal experiences into the archive, particularly to highlight the, somewhat paradoxical, relationship he feels with the public spaces he frequents. This relationship has become increasingly characterized by a simultaneous sense of overwhelming constraint – face-masks, hand sanitizer, social distance, etc. – and overwhelming liberation – thank God I’m out of the house, the earth is a beautiful place, etc. Elias has sought to document these personal experiences and feelings in a way that extends beyond his own lived experiences and is applicable to how all of our spaces have been changing in dynamic and visible ways.

The progression of Sam’s project of preservation has been similar to Elias’. At the beginning of this endeavor, Sam’s main focus of the collection was public-facing communications from local institutions (i.e. a newsletter from a bakery or an email explaining contactless prescription pick-up from a drugstore). How do local institutions conceive of and communicate their community role in this pandemic moment? Similar to the signage collected by Elias, Sam’s sources exemplify the tension facing local institutions – how does a store balance the need to maintain a neighborly image with the need to use frank, and perhaps forceful, language to ensure safety in the continuity (or suspension) of commerce. Preserving these communiqués will allow for present inquiry and future reflection on both how conceptions of the community were impacted by the pandemic and how local sights of community-building shaped our present experience. Over the course of the term, Sam, like Elias, has sought out more personal accounts of the moment. In the context of his particular inquiry, this means oral history interviews with individuals who work for local organizations and have been tasked with navigating the connection between institution and community. Though he is still in the process of seeking out and processing these interviews, Sam hopes that the shifting to personal accounts will illuminate the decision-making processes behind the aforementioned publications – how personal anxieties, priorities, blinders, and aspirations manifest themselves in the newsletters we receive in our inboxes.  Thinking back on our initial goals for this term, we feel a sense of accomplishment. Both of us articulated early on that we were excited to push ourselves beyond our comfort zones. For both of us, this meant bringing our ideas out of abstract, theoretical space, and putting them into practice. We feel as though we have both consistently pushed ourselves to maintain linkages between theory and practice this term. Spending winter term learning about the various silences, biases, and contradictions that are endemic to the creation and organization of any archive, we came into this term keen on creating a more representative archive by experiencing the processes and flows of power that make archives such unique bases of historical knowledge and analysis. Key to our learning this term has been the examination of and reflection on the silences in our collection, to what degree they are a product of our own positionalities, the realities of this moment, or a combination of both. It is easy to understand within the confines of a 6-credit class that a complete archive is a fallacy. However, becoming comfortable with the smallness of our own sample, that its inadequacies and strengths will only be made clear with the luxury of time, has been a difficult, but ultimately generative process. Our weekly journal entries and class meetings have been really fruitful spaces for us to continue to theorize about our roles as archivists and historians, our positionalities as individuals living through the pandemic (in privileged situations, no less), and how preservation takes on enhanced urgency in times of crisis. Meanwhile, in our individual collecting, we’ve both been able to center practice as a means to embody our theoretical positions, continue reckoning with how we wish to contribute to the archive, and consider the material obstacles that discipline our archival practices and the implications of those constraints for the archive that we ultimately construct.

I am curious what sort of ads and commercials folks are seeing in their areas? In Easton, PA, our local radio is playing ads submitted from local businesses, and they are fascinatingly unusual. Some sound so defeated, some are patriotic (join the forces working for Amazon!), some are attempts at normalcy.

Thoughts? Sources?

For my project thus far, I have done three interviews with Carleton students and have plans for a good number more. Other people have mentioned it already, but something I have very much struggled with is feeling like I am inconveniencing people or being a burden as I attempt to schedule these interviews. Life is hard right now and I don’t want to be the person adding one more thing to people’s already overwhelming lives. The “How Museums Will Eventually Tell the Story of Covid-19” reading quoted Lexi Lord who said, “The last thing we want to do right now is say, ‘There’s a shortage of ventilators; put one aside for us. ”And honestly, that’s kind of how I feel at the moment. Obviously I’m not asking for life saving ventilators, but I am asking for time and energy that people may need to put toward continuing to function. I know my personal amounts of both are severely limited. The article went on to say basically the same thing saying that “many curators are being careful not to demand too much space in people’s brains right now” so this is definitely a problem that many people are grappling with right now. And part of me says that it can’t hurt to ask and if people don’t want to or can’t handle it they will say no, but I unfortunately know enough people (and frankly am that person) who would agree to an interview even if they don’t have the time or energy to give that I still worry. So I’m struggling with that while at the same time knowing just how valuable this kind of work is and how worthwhile it is to compile all these stories. My group has tried to remedy this somewhat by keeping the interviews as short as possible, but by doing that we sacrifice how in depth we can go with each person.

I have so far been interviewing friends of mine which poses additional challenges as well. I think this was most apparent in the first interview I did with one of my best friends, Max Bremer. We had been talking casually over Facetime all day as we did homework together and then we switched to zoom to do the interview. As soon as we both logged into the zoom meeting and knew we were being recorded though, we instantly became different people that were stiffer, less open, and less comfortable than we had been not half an hour before. And this was an interview between two people who are 100% comfortable with one another. If not even we can be our authentic selves while being recorded, I’m just not sure it’s possible. Then there also came the issue I was not anticipating which is how hard it is to go through these kinds of questions with someone you care about that much. In answer to one of my questions Max started talking about how hard it was to not know when he would see any of his friends again being that everyone but me is a senior. This is something we as a group have been doing a good job of not talking about and to hear the very thing I myself am afraid of and have to stay in interview mode was difficult. This also leads into a more general issue too though, which is that we are asking some very personal questions. This can be difficult for both the interviewer and the interviewee. On one hand I want to record as much as possible, but on the other I don’t want to make people talk about things that are too personal or things that are painful to talk about. It’s a fine line to walk.

To widen the demographic of who we are interviewing, my group recently reached out to all the class Facebook groups. We very quickly got a large number of responses which was very encouraging to me. Seventeen people have gone out of their way to fill out our form and volunteer their time to do these interviews with us. A couple were history majors (nothing wrong with that, every voice is valuable and the last thing I would want to do is perpetually leave the recorders themselves out of the record) but there were also a lot of people I don’t know in the slightest who are volunteering their time because they understand the importance of what we are doing. Based on how much I’ve been grappling with not wanting to burden people, this was incredibly encouraging.

I am wondering, at this stage, how journaling in this more public mode has affected your thinking about the pandemic and your place as a historian? Do you think about your journal differently when you consider it as a piece of an emerging archive?

Prof. Susannah Ottaway

I have always journaled somewhat from the perspective of a historian. As a kid I would write entries like “I hope whoever comes back to read this will learn something interesting…” I have always used by journal more to address my observations about the world than my thoughts and feelings, but now this is further necessitated by the semi-public format.

I have so many thoughts about my journal. As someone who has researched extensively from journals, particularly those from Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, I have an unusual perspective on this moment in time. I do not think I am especially unique or significant, but neither did Mary Berg, or many others in history. In my experience trying to get interviews, I find that many people are uncomfortable thinking that their story is “valuable” or “unique” on a large scale, but of course every story is valuable and unique, just like every person is valuable and unique.

My last thought here is about my interview that I did yesterday. This was the first interview I have done, and I talked with Brynda McCoy, a woman who attends my church and whose daughter Daphne works as a dance teacher in Northfield. Brynda is in her 80s, and she told me about her own mother’s memories of the Spanish Flu… stories of the hearses coming and going past the graveyard in their home town of Five Points, Alabama. Brynda opened by saying “I don’t think I have much that’s interesting to say,” but I found that to be completely false. And she said that this is like nothing else she has lived through, not WWII, or 9/11. Those were horrible in their own rights, she said, but this level of disruption to everyone’s live is exceptional in her memory. And I found that troubling and powerful.

I’m going to keep the scope of this blog post quite small, but please bear with me! The majority of the time I’ve spent on HIST 200 this week has been figuring out the logistics of a series of interviews that I will be completing for my project. The interviews are with public health researchers who are in the midst of rejigging the scopes and goals of their studies to fit tis current moment. While writing emails along the lines of “what time works best for you?” or “I’m eager to work around your schedule,” I was struck by how consequential these formally banal essentials of email etiquette seemed to me.

The stakes feel higher now in almost all facets of life. Decisions about when to go to the grocery store or considering how to pass people on the sidewalk are inflected with concerns about one’s well-being that have a threatening primacy. This primacy too can be felt in the daily pressure to structure one’s day to eschew the mundanity of quarantine. So perhaps I was just projecting all these feelings of mine into these logistic emails.

Certainly, they are also struggling to adapt their lives to this age of pandemic, and don’t need the added stressor of being interviewed for a school project. Their medical research surely is too important to be distracted by archival interviews.

But on the other hand, I could not help but connect how concerned I was with imposing myself on these prospective interviewees to a few of the articles we’ve read for class.

Hester’s article, “How Museums Will Eventually Tell The Story of COVID” explains how all curators and archivists are attempting to preserve materials from and personal accounts of this moment without harming the individuals or organizations from where they obtain artifacts. Sure, preserving a ventilator has immense historical value, but a historical value that pales in comparison to its importance in this moment as a life-saving medical device.

In my case, the conflict is a bit less stark, but over the course of this week I have begun to grapple with the fact that the people who are producing the sources I am archiving are not just historical actors, but people like myself who are going through many similar emotions and having many of the similar experiences with the pandemic that I am having. Historicizing the present, I have realized, runs the risk, ironically, of dissociating individuals from their present context.

So the emails I was sending struck a nerve, and reminded me to more intentionally work to not just see my sources as agents of historical change, but just as people unsure about and central to the pandemic moment that we are creating and living through together.