Feb 9, 2021
by
Michelle May-Curry, Humanities for All project director
This Quarterly Column from the National Humanities Alliance discusses how organizations have used innovative approaches to the humanities to document, understand, and persevere in a year marked by pandemic and social unrest.
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many humanists set out to document the quickly worsening global health crisis. As the months progressed, a summer fueled by national protests against police violence and immigrant detention made apparent the overlapping social consequences of public health disparities and racial injustice amidst the COVID-19 crisis. In this context, scholars from a range of humanities disciplines created public-facing projects that aimed to record and understand the effects of social isolation, mass-death, higher mortality rates for Black and brown people, a steep economic downturn, and our collective digital existences.
The National Humanities Alliance’s Humanities for All initiative has been working to collect and document these publicly engaged humanities projects with particular attention to how scholars have been leveraging the methodological tools of the humanities to address this moment of crisis and change. Across these projects, we have noticed three trends in the field: humanists have cataloged the breadth of pandemic experiences through oral history and archival collection methods, they have creatively navigated the digital pivot with interactive programming, and have made meaning out of this moment with perspectives from history, literature, and art.
Most common across projects has been the use of oral histories and archival collection methods. These largely digital projects have used storytelling and critical reflection to amplify community voices and histories and help individuals navigate difficult experiences related to the pandemic. At Arizona State University, the project has published and mapped personal essays, images, and articles about the pandemic, collecting thousands of entries on their website in a matter of months. At Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab, students from the honors college were given disposable cameras and asked to document what it felt like to live through a summer of uprisings and isolation. Participating students then wrote reflections on what they experienced and told their stories through short podcast episodes. The of stories sits at the intersection of arts and humanities, as students curate their lives through images and narrative.
Humanists have also turned to global histories and literature to draw connections across cultural contexts. Many Title VI National Resource Centers have organized programming for secondary school teachers around themes of global health and histories of pandemics. The University of Michigan’s International Institute, for example, organized a 3-day virtual workshop for history, social studies, and English teachers titled Pandemics and Power in World History & Literature, where teachers learned how to use humanity’s historic encounters with disease to have challenging and timely conversations with students through literature. In lieu of in-person events and speaker series, the University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies produced a Youtube series of filmed conversations in which Iowa faculty, community partners, students, and staff h
