The week consisted of continued captioning and further marketing
for the internship. The project has been running smoothly with my transition as
the lead of it. I am glad to say that this week was more reflective of how far
this project had come in comparison to back in January or even in the Fall of
2020. The month of April always seems to be a busy time due to the closure of
the semester, but I am happy to say that the project has not slowed down nor
suffered due to the timing. So far, the project has a plethora of interviews
online or in the process of being published that will set out to expand upon
the perspective of COVID-19 on UCF’s constituents.
One aspect of this project that surprises me includes the
aspect of reproaching those interviewed to have a follow up after a year.
Reading that within the instructions Mary gave me made me think on how
collective memory shifts between the time you experience an event and what you
remember. Details or subtle things may seem more pronounced when given a fast discussion
of it in comparison to after a year. For example, I recall in a class a
professor remarked on how a holocaust survivor wrote extensively about the
concentration in Warsaw about the three chimneys always smoking before the
brief attempt at breaking free. The professor stated that, by historians’ accounts,
there was no chimneys nor smoke during the time. We often think about things in
the moment and so reading the instructions to take these interviews again makes
me wonder what will be different.
In Alfred W. Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic, the
historian writes extensively on the pandemic that occurs roughly a hundred
years before. Comparisons aside, the 1918 Spanish Flu collectively is whisked
away according to Crosby. Crosby studies a vast amount of area such as cities, military
bases, outposts internationally where Americans were stationed due to the war. These
perspectives quickly did not remark on it even if the sickness killed more than
the war did.
Crosby asks the question how does this happen? How do
historians notice this lapse of memory within the collective public on an
incident remarkable?
Crosby speculates that the impact of it was overshadowed by
the perception of the war or the nature of the flu being so fast. In comparing
this to the COVID-19 pandemic, do we have that same luxury?
These interviews have shown me that the pandemic has severely
hampered academic or private life from students to faculty. Students
experienced blockages in their academic routines, inability to see friends, and
having to respect safe guidelines to stop the virus. We live in a society that
has a vast amount of communication and ability to attend class from home.
However, that does not mean that the virus lacks any depth to it regarding
severity. The internship has taught me how collective memory works and how
people remember their experiences during a pandemic. In a few months, after
this internship, I’d like to know how people remembered it in comparison to
their first interview. Differences could provide me more knowledge on a subject
and a second chance for the interviewee to share their perspective.
Even after a year of the virus, the participants in this
project certainly continue to feel the struggles of living within a
post-pandemic world.
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