Nos Cuidamos is a collaboration between Cities for People, Not for Profit and the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project that has partnered with Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, MayDay Space, Mi Casa Resiste, Comida Pal Pueblo, and Riseboro Bushwick Grows Community Farm to help document experiences and systems of mutual aid that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews are available on the Cities for People, Not for Profit site, and can also be heard on the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s SoundCloud channel.
Category Archives: Oral History
Pandemic Oral History Project (Archives of American Art)
To document the cascade of public health, social, and financial crises set in motion by COVID-19, the Archives of American Art created an oral history series that recorded responses to the global pandemic across the American art world. Conducted virtually, the Pandemic Oral History Project features eighty-five short-form interviews with a diverse group of artists, teachers, curators, and administrators. Averaging twenty-five minutes long, each interview provides a firsthand account of and urgent insights into the narrator’s triumphs and tragedies in the summer of 2020. With more than thirty hours of recorded video and audio, the series bears witness to an unprecedented era as it unfolded in real time. Interviews are available on the project’s website and YouTube channel, as well as a podcast series on ITunes.
Illinois College: Archive Your Story
The Khalaf Al Habtoor Archives at Illinois College invites community members to “Archive your Story.” Anyone with a connection to the College can get involved by sharing journal entries, recordings, writings and other documents to be shared with the historians of tomorrow. The Archives will also undertake an oral history project which will allow contributors to record their stories. Community stories will be shared immediately through social media and the College website, which can be later archived.
Suggested ways to contribute to the project include:
- Compiling journal entries about day-to-day experiences. Whether you are a nurse treating sick patients, a grocery store employee, restaurant owner, student, parent — the list goes on — we hope to hear from you. A wide range of experiences will help us create rich resources that illustrate the widespread effect of the pandemic on campus life.
- Write an essay or other response about your experience. This can take whatever creative form you choose.
- Take pictures to document your experience. Document your home workspace, take a picture of something that has changed in your life or how you are staying connected or helping others.
- Speak up for the heroes you see. Share stories about others who have helped you or are making a difference in the community. Send a quick email or Facebook message to the College letting us know the stories in the IC community that interest you.
- Contact us to share your ideas. This project is a collaborative effort. If you have story ideas or want to contribute something unique, please contact us.
Anyone interested in learning more can email archiveyourstory@ic.edu.
An Oral History of Iowa’s Chinese Americans and Nationals Experiences during the COVID-19 Pandemic
This project, based at the University of Iowa, will conduct oral history research in three major towns in Iowa, including Ames, Iowa City, and Des Moines to collect the stories and testimony of Chinese nationals and immigrants and exhibit them to the general public.
Project members have already conducted interviews with several Chinese students on the campus and collected their stories fraught with frustrations and sadness. Integrated to the institutional oral history project operated by the University of Iowa Libraries, the team members of this research have collected oral history materials on the campus under the University Archivist of the University of Iowa (UI) David McCartney’s supervision.
Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive
In response to the pandemic, in spring 2020 the Public History Program and the McIntyre Library at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire joined with the Chippewa Valley Museum to launch the Chippewa Valley Covid-19 Archive, a rapid-response collection project to document the effects of the Coronavirus in rural Western Wisconsin. The archive is dedicated to preserving oral histories and materials related to Covid-19 and its impacts on the region, with the imperative to compile a diverse picture of its effects across our communities.
Documenting the Undocumented: Covid-19 Oral Histories & Immigrant Workers in Rural Wisconsin
“Documenting the Undocumented“ is a project at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire that seeks to collect and archive and make publicly available oral history interviews with Spanish-speaking populations in Western Wisconsin, particularly migrant and undocumented workers, many of whom work on dairy farms in the region. Documenting the experiences of Spanish-speaking, immigrant, and undocumented populations is an essential part of understanding the pandemic’s impacts in Wisconsin and the rural Midwest, as well as the intersections of race, power, and structural inequality that the crisis has highlighted.
This oral history project seeks to fill archival silences by preserving marginalized voices that have often been absent in historical sources and create a repository preserving a diverse cross section of experiences to help future scholars, students, and policymakers better understand the impact of Covid-19 on Wisconsin and the rural Midwest.
Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle
“Locked Down: An Oral History of the Covid-19 Virus in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle” collects stories about how the global pandemic shapes the lives of people in vulnerable Appalachian communities. During the summer of 2020 Shepherd University students conducted and transcribed 27 interviews. Interviewees included students, faculty, and administrators, local teachers and students from grades K-12, community members and business owners, and local government officials. Audio and video from the interviews will be housed in the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education and the Historic Shepherdstown Commission and will be available to the public online.
Afterlives of Pandemics, Past & Present
“Afterlives of Pandemics, Past & Present” is an initiative of Beyond Better, an interdisciplinary, multi-media public medical humanities effort that seeks to destabilize ableist narratives in American healthcare through oral history, storytelling, and art. The project asks, what can we learn about health, illness, disability, and society by looking at the current experiences of COVID-19 survivors alongside the past experiences of polio survivors from the mid-twentieth century? Using oral history and digital archival research, and in conjunction with the artistic vision of two solicited artists with disabilities, the project will collect and curate stories of survival from the current COVID-19 pandemic and juxtapose them with stories of survival from the mid-twentieth century polio epidemic in the U.S.
”Afterlives of Pandemics” will place stories of contemporary experiences into historical perspective and put them on our digital platforms at beyondbetter.org, and on our Instagram page (@thebeyondbetterproject). Original visual art works created by illustrators and animators from the disability community will help explore the experiences of interview participants.
Using the analytical lens of disability history as a way to move beyond the dichotomy of sick/well, the project will curate a series of individual stories and artistic interpretations that capture the historical continuities and departures that characterize the experience of epidemic disease in the minutes, days, weeks, months, and years after they touch people’s lives. It draws attention to the ways in which the afterlife of an epidemic disease continues to shape life in both intimate and very public ways, from the level of the individual, to the community, to society at large.
Collaborative COVID-19 Memory Banks: History and Challenges
Report of the international workshop held on 26 November 2020 with experts from European universities who have initiated public COVID-19 platforms to collect testimonies.
#HerTestimony: A Campaign About Black Women’s Experiences of COVID-19 in North Carolina
#HerTestimony is a three-part campaign organized by The Beautiful Project, taking place during June and July 2020, focused on raising the voices of Black women in the coronavirus pandemic. The three components are: an online survey giving North Carolinian Black women an opportunity to share their stories anonymously, a narrative project, and a guide to help Black women engage storytelling in their own spaces. The Beautiful Project is a collective of image makers using photography, writing and care to create spaces for Black women and girls to confront the mass misunderstanding, misrepresentation and misuse of their likeness in the media and in the world at large.