Generational Diversity in the Covid-19 Archive

This term, our group is focused on ensuring that we preserve voices from people across generational lines to get a fuller picture of how this pandemic is affecting families, communities, and individuals across the country. While recent news stories have often highlighted tropes of endangered and isolated seniors and community elders, while often pointing to children or young adults as unwarry, or even dismissive Coronavirus spreaders, this disease is affecting people of all ages and we want to preserve this full range of impacts in the archive. We are looking to utilize several avenues for this collection. Rebecca has begun to explore the impacts on seniors in rural West Virginia, asking them to record some of their experiences to include their voices and experiences of this year. Jacob and McLain are increasingly focused on the impacts of Covid-19 shutdowns on children and young people, with a particular focus on how education is adapting and how this affects students and families across the country. We have begun to gather sources from State departments of education, school districts, and teachers, and we hope to outreach and begin to gather experiences from students themselves in different areas. This might take the shape of written journals, photographs, recorded zoom calls, or even oral histories performed by students on their classmates that will document the experiences of a group underrepresented in news reports and fundamental to our understanding of how families and communities are responding to and enduring this pandemic.