Category: Work with Communities

I think that for future historians its important to think about the vulnerable spot people are currently in. When we ask people to share about their days and how their lives have been impacted, we are asking people to share things that are socially frowned up. We are asking people to discuss unemployment, sickness, death, and loneliness. The unique circumstances the pandemic has created means that people are in positions decline and often feel a sense of inferiority and insecurity due to this. It is a lot to expect people to be open and honest about those emotions they’re feeling and the experiences that are creating those emotions for them.

It is much easier for people to talk about positive during the time. It’s easier to discuss new hobbies, new pets, what art children are making, the new time they’ve found to read, the new recipes they’re trying, etc. While this demonstrates how the previous years promoted a workaholic culture that pulled people away from their personal interests, it does not create a complete picture of life during COVID-19.

From not asking the “right” question to feeling the pressure of being recorded, I think digital interviews have various limitations when trying to document the history of COVID-19 and personal experiences. Since the goal of our project is to collect as many perspectives as possible, I’ve had the opportunity to interview Carleton students from various backgrounds who all have handled the COVID-19 pandemic in different ways. Despite the diversity in responses, one similarity within all these conversations is the behavior of students’ when the interview officially starts. Every time I click the record button on Zoom, the interaction shifts from a more casual conversation to a seemingly rigid set of responses. Even though I don’t have much experience facilitating these types of discussions, and there are ways I could improve how I conduct the interview, I think there is a personal element lost through this form of documentation. It’s not that the information from these interviews isn’t enlightening or important for public memory, but I feel partially unsatisfied by this subtle shift in conversation that occurs when the interview starts.

I hope that as I continue to conduct these interviews, the flow of conversation will become more natural, portraying a realistic image of the interviewee, but in some ways, I’m not sure if this is possible. When I asked a friend about this subject, she said that it’s almost impossible to completely capture an individual and their experiences through recorded interviews over Zoom, which is why preserving art created during this time is so important. She mentioned that a painting, film, picture, etc. has the power to portray aspects of the self and its surroundings, which can’t be captured by answering a set of questions. I still believe that conducting and documenting these interviews with Carleton students is important, but there are limitations with both my experience and this form of preservation, which detracts a sense of character from the interviewee, possibly restricting the audience’s ability to empathize with the content of the video.

So far, I have collected documents and photos from my local area showing responses to coronavirus. This has been at local businesses and community gathering places. I also have recorded how my own life has changed and some of the activities I have been doing at home. This will hopefully capture some of the local changes that have occurred during this time. I have been focusing on collecting ephemeral things that may not be easy to document post-Coronavirus. I feel that in this part of my work, I have been pretty representative of the local community in the public realm.

My main focus is working with teachers and students in primary and secondary school to document their stories. In terms of the generational diversity, I see this as being an important perspective that is sometimes tough to reach as most sources come from adults. One thing I have hit a snag with is who is engaging and submitting things in the virtual classroom. These students are the ones who normally struggle less in school and have a home situation that is conducive to learning. This is something I need to keep in mind as a potential weakness of the voices I am collecting for the archive.  

As I look back over the motley collection of artifacts I have assembled for the Plague Year archive, I have come to realize their importance, not merely for the preservation of various materials from this spring, but as in some ways representative of my restrictions and abilities during the pandemic. My mother is a health care worker in a clinic where every patient has a compromised immune system, so I have not entered a building apart from my home for almost two months now. I do not have documents about how my friends are dealing with the disease because college students are going to school across time zones and it is difficult to find times to connect. The documents I have collected, in part, represent my interests and concerns during Covid-19, but they also represent my limitations and my loss of connection with the physical world, or at least to the people in that world. 

 I am experiencing this pandemic at home in Juneau, AK, where so far, we have been lucky to escape the worst effects of the virus. We learned yesterday of the 10th death in the state, the first death in several weeks as the Governor has been slowly reopening. While we have certainly had an easier time with the virus itself, watching the demise of the oil industry and tourism, the two largest industries in the state, has felt a bit like a lucid dream as we fall off a precipice. This is certainly a price I believe we are all willing to pay to protect our communities and I have heard little vocal resistance, but my fears for the future impacts of this pandemic, and my concerns for education, have certainly influenced my interest in documenting how children and students are being impacted. This summer, high school students would have begun working their first jobs as tour guides or fishermen, while younger children would often be left with grandparents while parents worked during the busiest season of the year. Instead, students who were generally brought up to avoid screens (as I recall my elementary school had a total of two computers) are being told to do their schoolwork with inadequate access to devices and increasingly spotty internet access. From my observations out my window it seems that most of them have given up amidst the first signs of spring, and have traded social studies for mud pies in the ditch and bicycle rides. This prompted me to look at the ways in which schools and curriculums are adapting to try to teach students amidst the distractions of quarantine. I intended this to be a broad sampling of the nation’s policies, but I have found that they have begun to cluster around the small towns of the Northwest, those places that, like Juneau, are facing low virus levels at the moment, but steep economic crises from boom and bust economies and problems of isolation. 

I grew up with the repeated avowal that ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Teachers and neighbors, elders and aunties, family and friends all have a part in teaching and supporting every child and the breakdown of those relationships are both isolating and worrying for the future. Yet the children running past my window are also heartening in their resilience, looking for ways to overcome their situation, and learning to ride a two-wheeler while they are at it. Of course it is important that these students are missing fundamental time in schools when they should be learning social studies, but as some communities’ distance-learning plans are beginning to grasp, at the moment, caring for your community may just be the most important civics lesson these children can learn.

As we continue to progress through this unusual term, I find myself thinking more frequently and more deeply about how this time will be remembered. As historians, we all have an understanding of the urgency that accompanies preservation and remembrance, but often it is difficult to bring that sense of urgency out of its theoretical location and into the material world of our daily practices and considerations. Any discussion that seeks to engage with “how historians will remember this moment” must foreground personal reflection, one’s own lived experiences, one’s own experiences as a historian. We are all historians; we look to the past for lessons. All too often, however, we forget to learn lessons from the present. We forget that, as the architects of a contemporary archive, we are responsible for making this moment coherent outside of our current context. We forget that the difficulties inherent to historical study are mediated through the work of archiving, and can be ameliorated by that same labor.

We must consider those things that have become commonplace, have become embedded in our prevailing assumptions about life in the era of COVID-19, and work to ensure that these concerns, anxieties, pleasures, and constraints are communicated through our processes of collection. In other words, the fact that I have effectively forgotten about the presidential election for the past month is noteworthy; we ought to find places in the archive for such subliminal alterations in the human psyche – these are necessary for making sense of the present, for making sense of the past. In many ways, consciousness dictates context; the facts of the past are only “authentic” or “true” insofar as they reflect the subjectivities of historical actors. To put it plainly, our experiences of this pandemic comprise the pandemic. As a moment in human history, COVID-19 can only be understood through the lens of human agency and human consciousness. 

We must also think of what disciplines our archival practices. The fact that we cannot be within six feet of one another is not merely a peculiarity of our current moment that is worth remembering; it is a momentous particularity that fundamentally shapes our ability to archive, to dialogue, to remember. These considerations are obvious now, but it won’t be long until they become disentangled with our collective common sense; historians of the future, including us, will not read the archive with an understanding of our current spatial concerns. They may not understand that the dearth of in-person interviews in the archive, for example, is not merely an absence but a historical fact in and of itself.

There is no thesis statement to my concerns, but for these reasons it is important that we stay vigilant in our collection processes, that we write lengthier descriptions and provide more context for our contributions, that we check our assumptions and deconstruct them in the space of the archive. The political implications of both history and emergency are currently in a dangerous entanglement; remembering is more important than ever.