‘An Unusual Period of Unspecified Length’: A Creative Oral History of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Citation

Bowman S, Al-Mulla R, Bromage S, Armstrong D & Pruente K (2024) ‘An Unusual Period of Unspecified Length’: A Creative Oral History of the Covid-19 Pandemic. In: Paper Trails. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.9781787359253.37

Abstract
First paragraph: For 2020 and most of 2021, there appeared very little doubt that the collective experience of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic represented an epoch-defining historical event. Millions worldwide had been killed by the virus and – for millions, if not billions, more – social, economic and working life was changed utterly in response to public health measures such as ‘social distancing’. Once developed and (albeit inconsistently) delivered, vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 was heralded as one of the triumphs of modern science. Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca – the names of big pharmaceutical companies hitherto relatively unknown to most people – entered the common lexicon. With the success of the vaccines in disarming the coronavirus in developed countries, daily life gradually returned to near normality. In time, the news agenda moved on. SARS-CoV-2 is likely to circulate for an indefinite length of time and has left its mark, especially on those suffering from ‘long Covid’, but the pandemic is passing into history and historians will increasingly have the opportunity to contribute to society’s understanding of the experience. When the news journalist completes their task, the historian – especially the oral historian – may step in to add new longitudinal and latitudinal interpretations of crisis events. As the early stages of the pandemic move into the realm of history, so it becomes obvious that there are a multitude of perspectives on the experience of the years following the emergence of the novel coronavirus at the end of 2019. Like anything else, the pandemic will have histories and not a history. The likely difficulties of writing these future histories are reflected in the content of this present intervention, which is based on excerpts from oral interviews with staff and students at the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. The University of Stirling Pandemic Oral History Project was established in 2021 – when social distancing measures were still in place in much of Europe – with the aim of creating a permanent record of the university community’s experience of Covid-19. The project’s interviews are deposited in the institution’s Archives and Special Collections as part of the Covid-19 Pandemic Archive. Alongside other materials including photographs, diaries and other ephemera, the interviews demonstrate the benefits of archivists as well as historians paying attention to what material can and should be collated and represented as crisis events unfold. As Walter Benjamin tells us: ‘the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again’. With his words in mind, this project was a joint attempt by historians, archivists and curators to actively gather evidence about the pandemic while the events were still relatively fresh in participants’ memories and is a model of contemporary collecting.

Keywords
Creative history; COVID-19; pandemic