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.
I really appreciate both the insights and the compelling ways that you frame them, particularly that realization that “Historicizing the present…runs the risk..of dissociating individuals from their present context.”
It was really interesting for me to see the way in which reflecting on your own position now helped you to come to a deeper sense of responsibility towards the people you are interviewing – a new level of empathy. I wonder how, more concretely, this level of reflection will shape the stories that you collect, and, as a class, how our collective experience will shape the archive as a whole.